Dry creek beds, burnt trees, sandy river systems, swollen billabongs, sweeping birds, veins of fresh flora on the rocks, walking tracks and camp sites give evidence to the intimate relationship Angelina enjoyed with her past and her land.

Angelina George was born in 1937, the daughter of the first Aboriginal pastor at the Roper Anglican mission. She worked in pastoral station camps as a young woman, spending much time with her relative Ginger Riley who became the key figure in the Roper River painting movement in the 1990’s.

George started painting as a child quickly developing her own style. Her paintings had little connection with the styles of Aboriginal art from the Roper River region. As described by Nicholas Rothwell in Journeys to the Interior, “George is a woman steeped in law and old belief, formed by the thought patterns of her languages, who nevertheless paints in a style all her own. The background is ceremonial, the sensibility is subjective.”

Angelina’s paintings are explorations of the landscape: reflecting and imagining the space and structure of the country.  The distinctive feature of her work is her attention to detail in capturing moody, undulating aerial perspectives of place.  Dry creek beds, burnt trees, sandy river systems, swollen billabongs, sweeping birds, veins of fresh flora on the rocks, walking tracks and camp sites give evidence to the intimate relationship Angelina enjoyed with her past and her land.  These journeys are magnified in bright bold paintings of layered bush flowers and birds.

In 1997 George won the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award’s general painting prize and was highly commended in 1998. She had become one of Australia’s most collected large-scale landscape painters. She exhibited extensively, been selected in numerous art prizes and is held in major collections including the Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, and the Laverty and Kerry Stokes Collections. Angelina George died in 2015.