Born c.1940 of a Pintupi mother and Pitjantjatjara father. In 1943 her mother went to Kintore after her father was killed in a spearing. She was raised by her mother’s second husband Shorty Lungkata, who taught her to paint as an older girl – as did Nosepeg Tjupurrula and Uta Uta Tjangala . She recalled her first experience of painting in the Papunya schoolroom. Her first husband was Musty Syddick, an occasional painter for Papunya Tula Artists in the 1970s. Linda Syddick’s paintings reflect both her knowledge of the Dreaming and her staunch Christian beliefs. She is one of a small number artists in the Western Desert style to have taken this syncretic direction. She uses the traditional symbols to denote simultaneously her Dreaming and the Christian story she is trying to depict in the painting. She paints Tingari Dreamings – her father’s Emu story from around Kintore, and her mother’s Snake story. In 1990 she travelled to Sydney to see her painting Ngkarte Dreaming hung in the annual Blake Prize for Religious Art and included in a travelling exhibition of 37 paintings to tour the eastern states. She has since been a finalist for the Blake Prize on several occasions and was included in Australian Perspecta 1993 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
- Writers:
- Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
- Date written:
- 1994
- Last updated:
- 2011
