The paintings of Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek carry the visual language of Western Arnhem Land rock art into bark, paper, and print.

Born in the Mann River region, Nadjamerrek grew up among the rocky escarpments, shelters, and caves of Stone Country. His father, Yanjorluk, taught him to paint on rock, and early works by both father and son survive within the region.

That direct relationship with rock painting remained fundamental throughout his life.

When Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek later began producing bark paintings for a wider audience, he did not invent a new visual language for the gallery. He adapted knowledge formed through Country, ceremony, rock shelters, and generations of painting.

Who was Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek?

Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek was born around 1926 at Kukkurlumurl in the Mann River region of Western Arnhem Land.

Art Leven records his community associations as Mann River and Gunbalanya, formerly Oenpelli, and his language as Kuninjku. His name also appears in historical records in several forms, including Bardayal, Nabarrayal, and Nabadayal.

He spent much of his youth moving between clan estates across the Arnhem Land plateau.

The landscape was not simply where he lived.

It contained ceremonial places, hunting grounds, rock shelters, ancestral narratives, and paintings made by earlier generations.

This environment shaped both his cultural knowledge and his artistic practice.

Learning to paint on rock

Nadjamerrek’s first artistic education came from his father, Yanjorluk, a respected rock painter.

Injalak Arts records that his father taught him to paint while he was still young in the Mann River region.

The British Museum similarly identifies Nadjamerrek as a renowned bark and rock painter who learned rock painting from his father in the upper Mann River region.

This is central to understanding his later work.

The figurative forms, internal anatomy, cross-hatching, and restrained use of natural pigment in his bark paintings did not emerge from studio experimentation alone.

They belonged to a much older regional visual tradition.

Stone Country

Western Arnhem Land is often described as Stone Country because of its extensive sandstone plateau, escarpments, rocky outcrops, caves, and shelters.

These environments contain an extraordinary concentration of rock painting.

Nadjamerrek grew up within this painted landscape.

Images were not separated from Country and placed within purpose-built galleries. They existed within shelters used by people moving through the plateau.

Painting, place, story, and memory were closely connected.

This context helps explain why his later bark paintings can feel both highly resolved as individual works and deeply connected to an older visual system.

From rock wall to bark

Nadjamerrek began painting more regularly for the public market around 1969 at Oenpelli.

Art Leven records art adviser Peter Carroll as an important figure during this period, encouraging artists and paying them directly for their work.

Bark created a very different surface from rock.

It was portable.

It could be collected.

It could travel to galleries and institutions.

Yet Nadjamerrek retained many of the visual characteristics associated with Western Arnhem Land rock painting.

Figures remain central.

Backgrounds are often relatively open.

Natural earth pigment establishes a restrained palette.

Internal forms and rarrk bring detail into the body.

The support changed, but the visual connection with Stone Country remained strong.

X-ray imagery

One of the most recognisable characteristics of Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek’s work is the use of x-ray imagery.

Animals and ancestral figures may be shown with internal organs, skeletal structures, or other details visible within the outline of the body.

Art Leven identifies this as a major feature of his figurative practice.

The term x-ray is useful descriptively because the viewer appears to see beneath the exterior.

However, the imagery predates modern medical x-rays and belongs to an established Western Arnhem Land painting tradition.

The figure is not represented only through outward appearance.

Its internal structure can be part of how it is known and painted.

Rarrk and the internal surface

Rarrk, or fine cross-hatching, is another central element in Nadjamerrek’s paintings.

The technique creates areas of repeated parallel or intersecting lines within figures and other forms.

Art Leven notes that Nadjamerrek frequently used distinctive parallel red lines in his infill patterns, helping distinguish his paintings from those of contemporaries such as Mick Kubarkku.

Rarrk creates both visual rhythm and structure.

A figure may appear relatively simple in outline.

Inside, repeated lines generate density.

This creates a striking contrast between the open ochre background and the concentrated internal pattern.

Figurative painting and open space

Nadjamerrek’s compositions often have a directness that separates them from more densely patterned painting traditions.

A central figure can dominate.

The background may remain largely unadorned.

A red, brown, black, or ochre ground creates space around the image.

This gives the figure considerable visual authority.

The composition does not need to be filled from edge to edge.

Instead, the relationship between figure and open ground becomes part of the painting.

This clarity is one of the characteristics most closely associated with his mature bark works.

Mimih spirits and ancestral beings

Nadjamerrek painted a wide range of ancestral and secular subjects associated with Western Arnhem Land.

Among these were Mimih spirits, long, slender beings connected with the rocky country of Arnhem Land.

Mimih imagery belongs to a much older rock painting tradition.

The figures can be exceptionally thin and elongated, appearing almost weightless.

Nadjamerrek’s capacity to carry these forms from rock art into bark and works on paper helped make visible the continuity between ancient painting traditions and contemporary artistic practice.

The subject may have entered a gallery.

Its cultural origins remained in Country.

Namarrkon

Another subject associated with Nadjamerrek is Namarrkon, the Lightning Spirit.

Art Leven currently lists a lithograph titled Namarkon, demonstrating how ancestral imagery from his painting practice also moved into printmaking later in his career.

Namarrkon is associated with lightning and the power of the wet season.

As with other ancestral figures in Nadjamerrek’s work, the image connects the visible environment with cultural knowledge.

Storm.

Lightning.

Seasonal transformation.

Country.

Ancestral presence.

These are not separate categories within the work.

Gunbalanya and Oenpelli painting

Nadjamerrek later lived at Oenpelli, now Gunbalanya, where he worked as a buffalo shooter and became increasingly involved in producing bark paintings.

The region had a long history of outside collecting, but a formal community art centre did not emerge until the establishment of Injalak Arts in 1989. Art Leven notes that earlier works passed through several government, missionary, gallery, and private distribution channels.

Injalak subsequently became one of the major centres for art from Western Arnhem Land.

Nadjamerrek’s reputation grew alongside this broader recognition, but his practice remained linked to the plateau Country where he had learned to paint.

Returning to Country

During the 1970s and 1980s, Nadjamerrek increasingly returned to live on clan lands.

Art Leven records that he established an outstation at Malkawo in 1980 and later moved with his family to Kamarrkawarn on his mother’s Country along the Mann River.

This return to Country is an important part of his later life.

Nadjamerrek was not only an artist producing images of cultural knowledge.

He was a senior cultural figure living within the places that knowledge concerned.

Painting sat within a much broader set of responsibilities involving Country, ceremony, family, and teaching.

Painting as cultural transmission

For Nadjamerrek, painting was closely connected with teaching.

Rock imagery had historically provided ways of recording and explaining animals, ancestral narratives, hunting events, and cultural knowledge.

The same relationship continued in his bark paintings.

Images could make aspects of knowledge visible.

They could provide a point around which stories were told.

They could help younger generations understand Country.

This makes his work particularly significant.

The paintings are not simply evidence of continuity.

They participated in maintaining that continuity.

Bark painting and the wider art world

By the 1970s and 1980s, Western Arnhem Land bark painting was attracting growing institutional and international attention.

Nadjamerrek’s work appeared in exhibitions concerned with Oenpelli art, Arnhem Land bark painting, and the visual traditions of Stone Country.

Yet his paintings remained stylistically distinct.

The open backgrounds.

White figurative forms.

Internal x-ray structures.

Precise rarrk.

These characteristics made his work immediately recognisable within the broader field.

Rainbow, Sugarbag and Moon

In 1995, Nadjamerrek’s work was shown alongside that of Mick Kubarkku in the landmark exhibition Rainbow, Sugarbag and Moon: The Art of Mick Kubarkku and Bardayal Nadjamerrek at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

Art Leven identifies the exhibition as an important moment in the recognition of both artists.

The pairing was particularly useful because it demonstrated both shared regional traditions and individual differences.

The artists worked within related cultural and visual frameworks.

Their paintings were not interchangeable.

Nadjamerrek’s particular handling of rarrk, internal pattern, and figurative form remained distinctly his own.

Working on paper

Later in life, Nadjamerrek increasingly worked on Arches paper.

Art Leven notes that this shift was partly practical, as suitable sheets of bark became harder to source.

The change of support produced a different surface but allowed his visual language to continue.

Natural pigment could still be used.

Figures remained central.

Rarrk could be rendered with precision.

Works on paper also allowed his imagery to enter new institutional and collecting contexts.

In 1999, Nadjamerrek won the Telstra Work on Paper Award at the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award.

Rock art and contemporary practice

One of the most important aspects of Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek’s work is the way it complicates distinctions between ancient and contemporary art.

He had direct experience making rock paintings.

He later painted on bark.

Then paper.

And print.

The visual language crossed these surfaces without becoming detached from its cultural foundation.

The British Museum describes him as both a bark and rock painter, reinforcing the unusually direct connection his career provides between Western Arnhem Land rock painting traditions and contemporary gallery practice.

This continuity is central to his significance.

Recognition of Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek

Nadjamerrek received significant recognition during the later decades of his career.

Art Leven records that one of his works appeared on a 40-cent postage stamp in 1982, that he received the Telstra Work on Paper Award in 1999, and that he was honoured for his contribution to First Nations art and culture in 2004.

Dedicated solo exhibitions followed during the 2000s, including presentations at Mossenson Galleries and Annandale Galleries.

After his death in 2009, his contribution continued to be examined through retrospective and legacy exhibitions.

The significance of that recognition lies not only in his artistic skill.

Nadjamerrek represented a direct line of cultural and artistic knowledge extending from Western Arnhem Land rock painting into contemporary art.

Looking at a Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek painting

A Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek painting often appears immediately clear.

A figure stands against an open ground.

The outline is strong.

Colour is restrained.

Then the internal detail becomes visible.

Rarrk.

Organs.

Bone structures.

Parallel lines.

Small changes in pigment.

The image becomes more complex the closer it is examined.

This movement from simple silhouette to highly structured interior is one of the defining experiences of his work.

The figure is both visually direct and culturally layered.

The legacy of Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek

Lofty Nabardayai Nadjamerrek died in October 2009.

His legacy extends beyond the paintings he left behind.

He belonged to a generation that had learned to paint directly on rock from senior family members.

He carried that knowledge into bark painting.

Then into paper and print.

He remained connected with Country and helped maintain cultural knowledge across generations.

His work makes visible the continuity between the rock shelters of Western Arnhem Land and contemporary First Nations art.

Rock.

Bark.

Ochre.