Doreen Reid Nakamarra was born in 1955 in Warburton, Victoria, Australia. As a young girl, she walked with her parents and other family members to the Lutheran settlement of Haasts Bluff, which had been serving as a ration depot since the early 1940s. Her family later spent time at the nearby community of Papunya. Following this they returned to the south-west to live at the Warburton community, enabling them to be closer to their traditional homelands.
Doreen attended school at the community of Papunya, where her family spent time.
As a single woman, in the early 1980s Doreen traveled to Kintore, where she met her husband, George ‘Tjampu’ Tjapaltjarri, who later established himself as a painter with Papunya Tula Artists. They eventually settled further west at the small isolated community of Kiwirrkura in Western Australia, to be closer to George’s country. In 1996 Doreen was one of a small group of women in Kiwirrkura who painted their first works through Papunya Tula Artists. She was a very occasional artist from 1996 until 2000, producing only a handful of paintings during that time. In the following years, however, her artistic output increased as her confidence and desire to participate grew. Between 2001 and 2003 she completed more than sixty works.
During the course of her developing career, Doreen’s style and compositional range continued to change. In the early period, the iconography in her work was typical of her contemporaries in its representation of women’s food-gathering stories. By 2003 she had developed a particular composition that satisfied both her cultural interpretation of the ancestral stories referred to in her paintings and the audience’s love for contemporary minimalism. That development marked a pivotal moment in the market’s recognition and appreciation of her work. Her style was influenced by her late husband, who also painted in a dichromatic minimalist manner.
Nakamarra was a quiet achiever who had been gradually honing her skills over the last decade. She was leading a group of relatively young women painters from Kiwirrkura who have continued to explore intricate line work and subtle color shifts. Her combination of fine brushwork and precise technique ensured that even her smallest works were highly detailed. On the larger formats, her style of finely drawn zigzags combined with broken lines of alternate colored dotting creates an optical effect in which the canvas appears to rise and fall like a series of meandering ridges and valleys. Those are tali, or sandhills, which surround all the major women’s sites at Kiwirrkura that Doreen referred to in her work. Doreen expanded on the theme and introduced an even more subtle use of color, using two or sometimes three slight tonal variations, and combining them with the complex, wavering line work that became synonymous with her signature pieces.
Nakamarra’s exhibition history peaked in 2007 when she was represented in twelve shows, including "Right here, right now" at the National Gallery of Australia, the Melbourne Art Fair, and Pintupi at the Hamiltons Gallery in London. Her paintings have an appeal that attracts the viewer from a purely contemporary perspective and have succeeded in introducing new audiences to Western Desert art. Moreover, Reid's work was featured at the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2009. In September 2009, Reid travelled to New York City for the opening of a Papunya Tula art exhibition which included her work. On October 18, 2009, Reid was admitted to the hospital for treatment of pneumonia. She was flown from Alice Springs to Adelaide, where she died in the hospital on October 20, 2009.
Quotations:
“I’m doing women’s story. It’s the dream.”
“When I paint it, I feel good. Strong.”
In the early 1980s Doreen traveled to Kintore, where she met her husband, George ‘Tjampu’ Tjapaltjarri, who later established himself as a painter with Papunya Tula Artists. George passed away early in 2005.
