Untitled

$1,800.00

Mick Rictor was around 30 years of age when in 1986 he made contact for the first time from deep in the heart of the Great Victoria Desert. His painterly compositions are both painterly and sparse, leaving form and space intertwined and suspended. His works reference the landscapes and changing colours of the Spinifex Country, the sweeping plains nestled in between parallel lines of sand dunes, the red rocky granite outcrops on the northern boundary, the sacred waterholes and their wanampi (serpent guardians) and mamu tjina (sorcerer’s footprints) from the Tjukurpa.

In this work Mick’s used a red pigment mixed with red sand from a nearby tali (sand dune) drawing focus to five sites that are too sacred to name. When Mick paints, he rarely provides answers yet somehow expresses the significance of these places in a minimal but powerful way. 

Mick Rictor was born at Kulpinya situated south of the significant site of Miramiratjara in the Great Victoria Desert sometime around 1956. This puts him in close proximity to the British Atomic Testing at Emu Fields and Maralinga during the ’50s and ’60s. Mick and his immediate family were living a nomadic life in and around traditional Spinifex Country up until 1986 when the family was located by relatives searching the area and taken to a then small settlement of Yakadunya and later Coonana. Mick is the eldest sibling of four with his other three siblings Ian and Noli Rictor and Tjaruwa Woods already established artists. He started painting in 2016 and his works feature references to Spinifex Country, the vast plains and sand hills, country holding secret water holes and mamu tjina or sorcerer footprints. Mick lives a solitary life with a large contingent of dogs that he keeps as company.