Fine Art Gallery

Artist Profile

After many of the oldest and most venerated men who began painting at Balgo Hills in the late 1980’s had already passed away, one artist emerged during the late ’90s and early 2000s, who may come to be considered the most remarkable of them all. Boxer Milner, a tall, gentle old cattleman began painting quite minimal, small, rigid, paintings with linear shapes and large amounts of monochromatic dotting in the late 1980's. Growing in confidence as an artist through the 1990’s, his paintings veered further and further away from conventional Balgo aesthetics as he went on to create ever more exciting and challenging compositions. His work stands out as the very best the region has produced in paintings that offer an entirely different vision from the vivid depictions of sandy desert country, characteristic of the majority of Balgo artists.

Born at Milnga-Milnga, south-west of Billiluna near Sturt Creek c.1934, Boxer was one of a small number who come from the transition zone between the desert and the river country. This is Tjaru land, where the country and vegetation move from flat and featureless rolling spinifex plains to flood plains with enormous river channels and permanent water holes. Here the yearly cycles of flood and dry create swamps with abundant bird life, through which runs Purkitji, or Sturt Creek.

It is the intimate knowledge of all the facets of the river system as a traditional owner of Purkitji, which informed the majority of Boxer’s paintings and his unique aesthetic. He represented this land in a way that was more than just physical - it was geographic, meteorological and mythical. His country is redolent with colours, landmarks, and a life force very different to that which exists only a short distance to the South, where the Great Sandy Desert begins. Paintings from this region have colours - blues and greens - that are not found elsewhere in Balgo art. In Boxer’s paintings, floodwaters are coloured by the white silt of the surrounding clay country. This is the ‘milk water’, which features in many of Boxer’s works, providing a geometric grid against which the rest of the landscape is represented, imposing carefully depicted boundaries of story over the land. His motifs refer to the miraculous transformations in the land and sky as new life seeps into the flat lands; of the passage of water and the changing coloured tides; and the mythological drama associated with the sight and sound of thunder, lightning, rain, and brilliant rainbows. Colour changes represent the trees and vegetation, the red and white stones, the black soil, the myriad channels and tributaries, the hills and the contours that define the artist’s home. All this is contained within the dot and line work that surrounds the inescapable forms and patterns that he employed to portray Purkitji.