Kurtal with pink cloud c.1992

Jarinyanu David Downs was a devout Baptist who unified his Christian beliefs with his Indigenous traditions through art. Downs’s integration of Christianity into his Walmajarri world view can be seen in his ongoing celebration of the ancestral rain man, Kurtal, who is prominently depicted in this painting. The artist explains, ‘God has created rain, and Kurtal is simply a vehicle for the expression of this creation’.

According to his song cycle, Kurtal was born on a distant island and roared over the ocean as a cyclone before landing in the coastal saltmarshes north-west of the Kimberley in Western Australia. As he travelled inland to the Great Sandy Desert, he created jila (places of ‘living water’ or permanent water sources) and interacted with other rain men before transforming into a water snake and retiring to his resting place within one of these jila.