Papunya

The Papunya Tula Art Movement began in 1971 when a school teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, encouraged some of
the men to paint a blank school wall and the resulting murals were the impetus for some of the men in the community to start painting for the market and by 1972 the artists successfully established their own company.
The company derives its name from Papunya, a settlement 240km north-west of Alice Springs, and one of the hills
in the immediate locality, called Tula, a Honey Ant Dreaming site.
Papunya settlement was established as an administrative centre by the government for the Aboriginal tribes who
moved from their traditional lands. Since then many Pintupi and Luritja people have moved back to their
homelands and continue their strong ceremonial tie to the Land.
The company, initially based in the Papunya area and now located in Alice Springs, recognised the need to expand the scope for artists associated with Pintupi artists andh now includes Kintore, Kiwirkurra and other associated communities in Western Australia that covers an area extending approximately 700 km west of Alice Springs). The Papunya Tula painting style derives directly from the artist's knowledge of traditional body and sand painting associated with ceremony with particular associations to the Pintupi people and the Tingari Stories. To portray these Dreamtime Creation stories for the public has required the removal of sacred symbols and the careful monitoring of ancestral designs.

From Bardon's introduction of a limited palette, the Pintupi artists have continued to paint in their distinctive, spare style at times using highly optical, geometry to describe the vast sandhill country of the desert and at others (particularly in women's paintings), heavy impasto, organic forms referencing ancestral ceremony sites.