Paddy Bedford

(circa 1922-2007)

Garnkoorlbany - Jack Flood, 2000

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Jirrawun Aboriginal Arts, Kununurra
Private collection, Sydney

LITERATURE
Russell Storer, Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, p. 148 (illus.)

In his essay 'Are we Strangers in this Place' for the 2006 Paddy Bedford retrospective catalogue, Michiel Dolk observes a strong visual affinity between Bedford's works and Abstract Expressionism, citing American and European forms of modernist painting by artists such as Arp, Miro, Picasso, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Rothko and Guston. The Melanesian and Oceanic influences in Jean Arp's work in particular 'may help to explain the often striking parallels between the metamorphic animation of figure-ground relationships in his motifs and those in PB's work. Garnkoorlbany - Jack Flood, 2000 undoubtedly shares 'Arp's conception of pictorial form', which Dolk aptly demonstrates by illustrating the current work alongside Arp's Untitled (White Shapes on Black Background), 1917.1

Despite its modern aesthetic, Bedford draws on his ancestral stories for the subject of his work. This painting takes its name from Garnkoorlbany, 'a place of a wattle tree (Acacia pellita) used to poison fish.' Small branches of this tree, which has lots of curly seed pods, are swished through the water giving an effect like soap. The fish rise gasping to the surface and can then be grabbed easily...Jack Flood is in the northern part of the artist's father's country going towards Pelican Hole.'2

1. Russell Storer, Paddy Bedford, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2006, pp. 41-42
2. Ibid, 133