Gloria and the Tea

When Gloria Petyarre came to paint with Tingari Arts she would usually arrive quietly and settle herself on the floor, sitting cross-legged with her canvas and paints.

But before anything began there was always one small request. 

“Make me a cup of tea.” 

It became our ritual. Gloria would paint, and I would make the tea.

Often family members would come and go during the day, sitting nearby to watch her work. I spent many hours doing the same, watching her create what felt like pure magic on the canvas.

Gloria would show me which stretched linen canvas she wanted and choose the paint colours. Then she would begin.

Her wonderful Leaves Blowing in the Wind, bush medicine paintings were created in a very particular way. She painted the composition three times. The first pass formed the structure, and the next two filled in the spaces between the leaves. Sometimes she used three colours, sometimes two, sometimes only one.

One day in 2004, while I was sitting with Gloria watching the magic unfold,
she suddenly told me to get a small piece of scrap linen and try copying what she was doing.

So I did.

When she saw the terrible mess I had made she looked at it,
then at me, and said very calmly,

“You continue to make the tea and I’ll do the painting.”

A very sensible plan.

Gloria held the paintbrush close to the top and made the most graceful movements with her wrist, creating leaves that seemed to float across the canvas.

Meanwhile my own attempt looked like it had been run over by a road train on a rough outback gibber road.

It was obvious that while my jerky strokes were done with great determination, the magic simply wasn’t in my soul the way it was with Gloria.