Ernabella Visions

Ernabella Arts is a community based arts association through which artists can sell their work or come in and paint on a daily basis. Ernabella is known for its magnificent fabrics as well as printmaking on paper and paintings on canvas, linen and silk.


Ernabella is 440 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs, just south of the Northern Territory border in South Australia. The community was established in 1937 as a Presbyterian Mission and the surrounding country is home to approximately 400 Pitjantjatjara people. It is the oldest permanent settlement on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands.


Ernabella Arts began in 1948, making it the oldest Aboriginal Arts Centre. The centre employs a coordinator to assist members in marketing and developing their products.The craft room was set up to provide employment for Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara women by applying their spinning skills to wool from the sheep run on the Mission station. From this beginning women and girls have produced art in many different media, all incorporating the distinctive Ernabella design.Batik has been synonymous with Ernabella since the mid 1970s and the resultant silks have featured in many national and international exhibitions. Silkscreened fabrics have been produced there since the late 1980s.Woollen work became less economical to produce by the late 1960s and the artists were introduced to batik as a fabric decoration technique. Batik quickly became a signature art form for Ernabella. Artists also used the batik design medium for hand-tufted rugs and carpets. Batik (lost wax) technique is also used to decorate a range of ceramic pieces made in the Ernabella ceramic studio which began in 2003.Since attending a printmaking conference at Northern Territory University in 1993, Ernabella artists have also been making etchings and lithographs on paper in collaboration with printers from Northern Editions.Using skills acquired in fabric design, Ernabella women have excelled in these print mediums and their work has been exhibited extensively in Australia and overseas. They have continued to make regular printmaking trips to Darwin.Painting styles went through radical developments from 2002 and Ernabella painting now encompasses subjects drawn from Tjukurpa (Dreaming stories); mai putitja (bush food stories) and elements of the early anapalyaku walka (Ernabella style).Ernabella work is represented in the major public galleries and in private collections in Australia and overseas and has been featured in a number of recently books on Aboriginal Art. The artists have their own Ernabella Arts Web site. http://www.ernabellaarts.com.au/

Ernabella Artists

Lady Halaman Berhuburgan

Hans Hartung

Hans Hartung, (born Sept. 21, 1904, Leipzig, Ger.—died Dec. 7, 1989, Antibes, Fr.), French painter of German origins, one of the leading European exponents of a completely abstract style of painting. He became particularly well known for his carefully composed, almost calligraphic arrangements of black lines on coloured backgrounds.

Fred Otnes

In the hands of collage artist Fred Otnes, control merges with chance to create works of subtle, refined beauty that are designed with such assurance as to appear inevitable, works that are infused with a mystery that is both fleeting and eternal.

Born in 1930 in Junction City, Kansas, Otnes trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he first encountered Cubist works by Braque and Picasso. The Modernist commitment to form without the illusion of depth captured his imagination, though it would be some time before he incorporated it into his own work. Otnes first pursued a career in traditional, realistic illustration in Chicago, and then, from 1953, in New York. While working for national magazines and advertising clients, he and his wife, Fran, built a house in Connecticut designed by architect John Johansen in the International style and furnished it in classic Modernist mode.


By the mid-1960s, aware of the shrinking market in magazine illustration, Otnes made a bold change in his method of working, finally putting into play the ideas that had dictated his taste and interest for years. Using newly-honed printing, photo-transfer, and collage techniques, he pioneered a unique look: multiple images across a one-dimensional plane. This was the perfect form in which to depict some of the more complex concepts of the era such as the war in Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. At the top of his field, Otnes received more than two hundred awards for his work.


Once again sensing a change in the business in the mid-1980s, Otnes committed himself solely to creating gallery work. Fully able to explore the art of collage on his own terms, he has continued to push at the boundaries of scale and abstraction in his work, as is clear in the catalogue section of this book. The text describes his motives and motivations with each transition in his life, especially what artist Mark English describes as Otnes’s "metamorphosis" from realist illustrator to collage artist. Otnes also discusses some of the many and disparate artists and art forms he admires, from Piero della Francesco to Richard Diebenkorn to Outsider Art. He speaks of the challenges of work, the nearly fugue-like state he sometimes achieves when in the studio, and considers the never-ending difficulties that the medium itself imposes, as well as those he imposes upon himself so that he remains interested and the work continues to grow.

With elements as diverse as appropriations from Renaissance and Old Master works, eighteenth-century engravings, bicycle patent diagrams, sheet music, feathers, fabric, and flowers, Otnes demonstrates in image after image a subtle, elegant world where imagery and surface interact, where tonal and textural shifts delight, and where secrets and mysteries emerge from the torn paper and scraped away paint. A world where beauty and meaning hover in wordless communication between artist and viewer.