Season's greetings for 2007!

It has been a long time since the last Newsletter from me, for which I apologize. But there are now some special things to announce.

The first and most important is that we have arranged with the Balgo art centre to offer a very special Christmas sale over the next week or so. All paintings in this Christmas sale of Balgo paintings are reduced by 20% from their normal price!

Some examples from the sale are given below but all of them are listed in the PDF catalogue (click on the link to view it) - more details and some examples are below. The Balgo online sale listings will be available 10.00 am Australian Eastern Standard time (or midnight GMT) on Thursday 6 December 2007.

The other important news is that we will be holding a special online exhibition of new paintings from the Mornington Island artists, starting on Friday 14 December. Artists such as Sally Gabori and May Moodoonuthi have been generating a great deal of interest and we are pleased to be able to offer online access to high quality works by Sally, May and other Mornington Island artists.

In September this year I was elected as President of the Australian Indigenous Art Trade Association (ArtTrade). I am pleased to be able to take on this role and look forward to helping push forward with the code of ethical conduct for the Indigenous art industry. More information about this code is given below.

Martin Wardrop
Director, Aboriginal Art Online Pty Ltd

The paintings in our special Christmas Balgo show are listed in the PDF catalogue (click on the link to view it).

The Balgo online sale listings will be available 10.00 am Australian Eastern Standard time (or midnight GMT) on Thursday 6 December 2007.

The paintings will be available to buy immediately online (unlike most of our listings where you need first to check availability). So act quickly as the paintings will be sold to the first person who commits to the purchase using our online shopping cart!

Patrick Smith "Budgerigar" 75x150 cm 2007	Eubena Nampitjin "Midjul" 75x150 cm 2007	Vincent Nanala "Wilkinkarra" 80x120 cm 2007

Tossie Baadjo "Karntawarra" 80x120 cm 2007	Theresa Nowee "Puntujalpa" 100x100 cm 2001	Jimmy Tchooga "Tjukukalyu" 80x120 cm 2007

We are hosting an online exhibition of Mornington Island paintings in conjunction with the Mornington Island art centre and Woolloongabba Gallery. The exhibition will open online on Friday 14 December. It features works by Sally Gabori (Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda) and May Moodoonuthi (Thunduyingathi Bijarrb) .

Sally Gabori and May Moodoonuthi gained national recognition in 2006-7. They have exhibited together and Sally was a finalist in the Xstrata art award in 2006. Sally Gabori and May Moodoonuthi grew up together, hunted and fished together, have weaved together and these days in their senior years, paint together.

Simon Turner of Woolloongabba Gallery has expressed his enthusiasm for Sally's painting : "There are a myriad of different reasons I think Sally's work's appealing - from her palate that she's using, the subject matter she's painting about is probably the most interesting thing, because she's painting of a landscape that we haven't seen before. And this is Queensland being told by one of our oldest story tellers and it's the Gulf, it's the colours of the tropics so to speak but its also the life of the tropics."

 

 

 

 

 

 

An important exhibition "Papunya Painting: Out of the Desert" has just opened at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. The Museum holds an outstanding collection of Papunya Tula art including many large canvases. Most of these paintings have never been seen in Australia in the three decades since they were painted.

They were mainly collected by the Aboriginal Arts Board (AAB) of the Australia Council, which was created in 1973. Amongst other things it provided grants for Aboriginal communities to employ managers and to help sustain Aboriginal culture and arts. Some of the Papunya paintings bought by the Board were lent or given to Australian embassies around the world while others were donated to public museums and galleries. These helped to raise the profile of Aboriginal art in the commercial art market.

In the 1980s the AAB wound up its exhibition program and in 1990 the collection of Papunya paintings was transferred to the Museum. These form the substance of this outstanding exhibition.

The exhibition is organized by the sequence of coordinators with Papunya Tula Artists starting with Geoffrey Bardon and going as far as Andrew Crocker at the beginning of the 1980s. The high quality catalogue which accompanies the exhibition is available through our Online Shop.