I was sad to read about Paddy Bedford's death when I was glancing through the newspapers in a packed Qantas lounge waiting to return to Adelaide from Hobart.

He had a major retrospective at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art's 2006 survey exhibition, which traced his brief but productive body of work that transgressed the familiar boundaries of white and black cultures in Australia.

Bedford continued and developed the distinctive 'Turkey Creek' or 'East Kimberley' style of painting. His expanses of plain ochre with a few well chosen shapes and sparse lines marked by white dots recall the minimal approach of artists such as Rover Thomas and the strong lines and rounded forms of artists such as Queenie McKenzie and Jack Britten.

Bedford only began painting on canvas for exhibition about a decade ago (1997/98) when he was around 76 years old after fellow artist Freddy Timms set up the Jirrawun Aboriginal Art group at Rugun (Crocodile Hole) in 1997.

Paddy Bedford's striking, austere style, his "walking line" and stark colour contrasts created a new era in Kimberley art; one that filled the void left by the deaths of Rover Thomas and Paddy Jaminji who had opened up new possibilities for Aboriginal men in Turkey Creek.

Paddy Bedford, Untitled, 2006, Gouache on artists board

The breakthrough exhibition, both for Bedford and Jirrawun, was the bold, politically untramelled Blood on the Spinifex show, staged in 2002 by the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. Bedford's unsparing depiction of massacre sites in his country formed the heart of the show. Works such as Emu Dreaming and Bedford Downs Massacre, which he painted in 2001, and Two Women Looking at the Bedford Downs Massacre Burning Place, from 2002, memorialised the horrors his people had faced.

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Posted by: Les | July 22, 2007 04:45 PM

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