Dreaming frog spirit

Peter Marralwanga began painting late in life, when aged in his mid-fifties, but soon established himself as one of the leading and most influential Kuninjku artists of his generation. He was a close friend of the esteemed bark painter Yirawala, who taught him to express his senior cultural knowledge in painting for a non-Kuninjku audience. Inventive and original, he shaped the next generation of leading Kuninjku bark painters, notably his son Samuel Namundja and nephews Jimmy Njiminjuma and John Mawurndjul.

Dreaming frog spirit was painted at Marrkolidjbad, a camp in western Arnhem Land established by Marralwanga with Yirawala. The work captures Marralwanga’s distinctive visual aesthetic – an ancestral figure constrained within the confines of the bark, seemingly crouched and ready to release its contained spiritual energy, and rendered in his pioneering style of alternating bands of differently coloured rarrk (cross-hatching), an approach that simultaneously ruptured and respected tradition.

Barry Patton, Tarnanthi Writer & Researcher