Free Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay Page B

where it had been chopped, and I saw something glinting in the debris. In fact I saw a lot of things glinting. It turned out that the “caterpillar” was made of a rock that flaked off with shiny silica dandruff. This rock on the road to the casino was not just ordinary stone, it was stone that changed color as you moved. Once again I saw how the “sacred” was something that was full of gleaming colors.
    Everywhere in Alice Springs you can find Aboriginal designs. They are on logos and place mats, T-shirts and didgeridoos, and, of course, they are on canvases—in the dozens of art shops that line the streets of the town center. There were a few of the Northern Territory ochre paintings I had seen at the beginning of my journey, and there were others that seemed to represent some kind of stylistic transition—by artists who came from the Kimberleys to the north-west of Alice, who still used ochre but in ways that involved large areas of paint, rather than either dotting or stripes. One of the most powerful of these was a man called Rover Thomas, who lived between 1926 and 1998 in Warmum, Turkey Creek, just to the west of the Darwin–Alice road, and about halfway along it. His paintings look like pieces of kangaroo skin stretched taut with pins of white pigment. The work seems less a painting of the country than a kind of wrapping up of the country—rather as Christo did with the Reichstag in Berlin. He uses a deep chestnut brown and his skies are the color of bitter chocolate. He always uses natural pigments, often mixed with bush gum and applied to marine ply.
    But most of the paintings in Alice were, quite naturally, from the Central Desert. They were bright acrylic canvases in patterns of dots and curls and splashes and concentric circles. If they had been from Europe or America they would have been given labels like “abstract expressionist” or “neopointillist,” and the influence of such artists as Miró and Picasso would have been discussed in unending detail. But they were from Australia with their own distinctive artistic inheritance, so although those comparisons have been made, they have mostly been allowed just to stand for themselves. Many of the paintings had a title like “Two Snakes Dreaming” or “Dingo Dreaming,” and some included explanations of the iconography—that, for example, a concentric circle meant a waterhole, or that an oval shape was a shield, or that little curled lines represented men sitting at fires. These were some of the stories that had so intrigued Bruce Chatwin, in his journeys for the book that became Songlines , describing the way Aborigines traditionally conceptualize Australia as a series of sung stories, criss-crossing the land.
    The paintings, when you look at them for more than a few minutes, seem to be an exercise in optical effects—like one of those Magic Eye games, with an obvious picture in the front and another picture “behind” it which you can see if you focus away from the paper. Like the shiny red ochres that I had not seen but had heard of in Arnhemland and South Australia, the paintings from the Central Desert seemed almost like another way of flipping reality. In their case by dotting it into non-existence.
    I began to recognize some of the different artists—particularly the more famous ones. Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, whose work was made up of bold squares, either set inside each other or spiralling geometrically into a central point. Then there was Rover Thomas, of course. And the Petyarre sisters—Ada Bird, Gloria and several others, much of whose work is made of small, swiftly painted dashes in contrasting colors such as green and purple, giving the effect of a weeping willow shivering in the wind. Listening quietly to conversations in different galleries, I learned that “Glorias” were getting more expensive, while “two Ronnies” cost about the same as a car nowadays. “Though good Ronnies are so hard to get nowadays,” was the sad