Yannima Tommy Watson
Caterpillar Dreaming
2016

Name: Caterpillar Dreaming
Brand: Yannima Tommy Watson
Price: 16900 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Yannima Tommy Watson is a Pitjantjatjara artist born around the 1930s, in the bush some 44km west of the small isolated community of Irrunytju. Not yet very well known to the French public, despite his participation in the architectural project of the Musée du Quai Branly, Tommy Watson is nevertheless often considered the greatest living Aboriginal artist. Like many aborigines of his generation, he lived a traditional, nomadic or semi-nomadic life before his contact with Western civilization; then he will occupy the only jobs that the Aborigines find: herdsmen (until Yuendumu), laborers for the construction of infrastructures in the desert. Throughout this period he became familiar with his "country", a harsh region, and deepened his knowledge, both profane and sacred, relating to Dreams and Dreamtimes, to the connections between sacred sites and the Ancestors. He will even work in Papunya, where the artistic movement started. But the Pijantjarra are intransigent with tradition…no question at this time of revealing the motives and the secret stories. The North of South Australia, the region where he is from, was touched by the pictorial movement only at the very beginning of the 2000s. In 2001, Tommy began his career as an artist in Irrunytju (Wingellina). He is a young artist… He learns by observing other painters and draws on the experiences of a long life and on the exceptional knowledge he has stored up. But quickly he will find his way, a radically new style where color plays a major role. Very quickly, the iconography now well known by the artists of Yuendumu, or the Western Desert, Balgo or Lajamanu disappeared. The symbols are no longer there. As Rover Thomas, Emily Kame or Paddy Bedford had done before him, this is a real artistic revolution. For Tommy, it is not a question of describing his Dream (Caterpillar), the routes taken by the Ancestors. He concentrates on a site, a story, sometimes very profane, the memory of a meeting, of a hunting party, tries to condense his memories, the information of which he is the depositary, to add a poetic touch to it, sometimes melancholy, and this gives a painting with a very abstract aspect. It is a painting where the emotion is very present, undoubtedly less cerebral than the art of the neighbors of the north the Pintupi, like Ronnie Tjampitjinpa, George Tjungurrayi,… The success is very fast. Of course what distinguishes his work is the color, very little present in the Western Desert. The red, that of the initiates' headbands, which Tommy often wears, brings a very warm note to his compositions. Yellow, blue, orange and white, sometimes purple mauves come to mark the space, create zones and reinforce the luminosity. It is undoubtedly this mix of purity and bright colors that has led art critics to compare him to Rothko or Kandinski. The technique is also special. It can be compared to the paintings of Pintupi women (Wintjiya Napaltjarri for example). The dots, quite wide with Tommy, are deposited in thick layers, which sometimes, in the best works, touch to form a flat surface very rich in matter. But Tommy goes further, because by adding his colorful and luminous touch, he manages to transcend the traditional style of Aboriginal painters to switch to contemporary art. Tommy ends his famous life. Two books are devoted to him, a film is planned which will retrace his incredible human and artistic adventure. In 2007, one of his paintings (Waltitjatta) sold for 240,000 AUD (almost €150,000). For Tommy, around 2015, it's the end, his last exhibition ended (Kutju Wara, the last one) "I'm tired. I am an old man,” he said. “I've done it many times and I'm getting old. ". He died in 2017.

Creator:

Yannima Tommy Watson (1935, Australian)

Creation Year:

2016

Dimensions:

Height: 48.04 in (122 cm)Width: 38.59 in (98 cm)

Medium:

Cotton Canvas,Acrylic

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2010-