Sister Pieces "Since The Beginning" By Rainbow Featherfoot + "Unseen Rivers and The Desert Rose" By Sabrina Ronzitti

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Collaborated Artwork from the Northern Territory.  Artwork for sale as one items only. Option for exposed framing to be done based on request*

Painting name: Since The Beginning

Artist: Rainbow Featherfoot

Painting size: 105cm by 45cm

Medium: Acrylic paint, paint pens, Country materials - pure rainwater, red, white and yellow Northern Territory ochre

Hello dearest reader,

My name is Lili Pich and I am also known as the Rainbow Featherfoot. This is my artist name that was gifted to me by a wise woman many moons ago. I come from the South-West of Western Australia, and the Great Southern forest of Noongar Boodja is my home. I have spent the last couple years traveling our beautiful Country Australia, and creating artistic activism in the form of contemporary Indigenous art. My ancestry on my Father’s side is Cambodian and on my Mother’s side I have connection to the Wiradjuri mob in New South Wales. 

The inspiration for this painting came through from my travels around the Northern Territory, and seeing many incredible art galleries of ancient rock art in the beautiful rich remote Country. Of all the petroglyphs and art styles I’ve seen, my favorite style is the simplest and oldest - the ochred handprints. Our current modern technology has dated some to be approximately 20 thousand years old, but I know we’ve been artists for much longer. I see those hands as the ones that looked after the Land and Waters, and that priceless knowledge and responsibility was passed down through many generations. This is why I have outlined them with gold. This piece is also the sister piece of another painting made by my beautiful and talented sister Sabrina who added the black lines with the red, orange and yellow. She said she was inspired by the charred and dry landscape from the burn offs, as we are currently in the height of the dry season. 

I painted my own hands, and collected the ochre in my local area, and the background was rained upon so it is textured to touch. It amazes me that some rock art is still vibrant especially after a wet season, which this piece illustrates with the blue. The dots around the handprints is rain running off the rock art, and the symbols in the corners represent storms and water holes filling up. Something I’d like to share that touched me deeply is that an Elder in the Kimberleys told me that: “The Spirits in the paintings are still alive and watching us, and when we share the right stories and sing the right songs, they stay and we keep passing on our culture to the next generations”.

This piece is a reminder to continue connecting, learning, liasoning, and giving Aboriginal people back our rights to continue looking after our Lands and Waters like we’ve always done. 

We have always been here, since the beginning. 

Thank you for loving this piece as much as I do, and supporting me and Indigenous arts.

All my love and gratitude, August 2024.

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Painting name: Unseen Rivers & The Desert Rose.

Artist: Sabrina Ronzitti

Painting size: 105cm by 45cm

Medium: Acrylic paint, Country materials -  red, white and yellow Northern Territory ochre

When I started this painting in Wagait Beach, it was the day after I had flown into Darwin. Although I had only seen very little of the land at this point, I already felt the immense potency of the old Territory. I had a large canvas with some handprints on it and a base of earth sands that I had painted in a rain storm some months before.I left it raw and unprimed.

My sister Lili (aka Neela) and I cut the canvas in half and shared this once single canvas to create a sister piece together on Country. I had painted about 60% of this work before we left to explore the national parks, and it was guiding me to paint differently from my usual style. Mandalas are my typical style, but I also incorporated influences from the spirits, animals, and plants around me. The centrepiece of the circle and petals was the first part I created.

I didn’t have a clear vision for this painting before starting—I just began. Once I had created the circle and petal-like shapes, I felt like I was tuning into some sort of spiritual guidance, though I wasn’t exactly sure “what it was” until Neela said it looked like the Desert Rose. I replied, “Desert Rose?” She said it’s the symbol on the Northern Territory flag. I instantly googled it and was amazed at just how similar it looked to what I had painted on the canvas before me. Sitting to my right on the long wooden chair was, in fact, a Desert Rose plant that Neela and Stewy (Neela’s beloved partner) had, but it hadn’t flowered yet. When we got back from our time on Country, the Desert Rose was in full bloom.

I continued painting, feeling into the land and the natural world around me. I didn’t try to copy or depict it in its already grown manifestation but rather sought to immerse myself in it so that any visions of different forms would naturally come forth from deeper within my creative consciousness. The ocean “spoke” to me, saying, “I want to be in this too,” as if a child was feeling left out. I giggled and said, “Yes, okay, of course.” That was the light blue that came into the painting. I then felt called to mix two colours together—a brown and a blue—without any preconception of what those blends would produce.

To my surprise, I created the most perfect crocy green colour, exactly like the reflections of all the rivers around here. I was pleased.

I then added black to represent the charred land resulting from ongoing bushfires and burn-offs, which are a huge part of life in the Northern Top End. After six months of the dry season, at the end of the year, the North is flooded with heavy rains that mark the arrival of the relieving wet season. Before coming to Darwin, I hadn’t seen such controlled fires before; where I grew up, smoke on the horizon usually meant danger. But up here, it’s how the land has thrived for thousands of years. The flashes of fluorescent green I saw flying into Darwin were all the new vibrant healthy regrowth of cycads, eucalyptus trees, and wispy palms after the fires. In Kakadu, we learned how important these fires are to maintaining balanced and thriving ecosystems. Without the fires, many of the plants wouldn’t flourish as they do. It’s absolutely fascinating that both extremes are necessary for life to continue thriving—a nice reminder of polarity and the yin-yang equilibrium.

 This painting has many aspects, and many more open to interpretation by others. The inner rings of the mandala represent the rings inside a tree hollowed out by termites. Small to tall castle-like termite mounds are common sights everywhere, and it was incredible to see a new type called ‘Magnetic Termites,’ which build their mounds aligned with the North-South magnetic field of the Earth. This positioning helps keep them cool in the heat of the day. They’re very smart little builders—like ants and bees. I saw pink and brown squiggle marks from white ants on the underside of bark that wraps around the wood of a branch or tree, leaving behind beautiful patterns. To me, these patterns resemble the way a riverbed looks from the sky, mirroring the engravings in the wood. The larger symbols that stand on either side of the Desert Rose represent the river (female) and the sea (male)—an ode to both the Shiva and Shakti masculine/feminine cores of creation, their essences coming together in perfect harmony to start, sustain, and end all life.

As I finished this painting, after watching a tiny black ant crawl across the canvas, a thought struck me: There are rivers everywhere.

There is the river as we commonly know it—water flowing from the mainland to the sea, in perfect snakelike bends and turns. But there are also rivers of many other things if we choose to look closely. For example, a river can be seen in a line of ants walking single file from their source, branching out to find food and water. Rivers can be found in trees, with termites moving up and down the trunk, or with water running through the bark from roots to leaves and back down again. Rivers flow through our very bodies, in the veins and arteries that carry blood to our muscles and then back to the heart. There are rivers that make their way from the source to every living thing we can touch, smell, see, taste, and hear. There is a pulse—a river—of water. Life is water.

The squiggly patterns are depicting the passages that little bugs have made underneath the bark of the wood.

The gold in this painting represents the alchemy that water brings us—healing, life, cleansing, protection, transmutation, and change. The sight of golden sparkles on the water’s surface when the sun hits it is one of my favourite things to see.

I hope you enjoyed reading about this painting. 

With lots of love and gratitude, 

Namaste Mahatma.