Yannima Tommy Watson

Yannima Tommy Watson "Ngayuku Ngura" - 91x122 cm -2013 - Aboriginal Art

2013

Artist: RHODA TJITAYI, (1969 -), Titre: Piltati Tjukurpa 200x300 cm - 2021 Acrylique on canvas From Art Centre réf:15021AS Aboriginal Art Biography: Rhoda Tjitayi’s monumental p...

Wingu Tingima (c.1920–2010) "Kungkarrakalpa" 110x203cm - 2006 Acrylic on linen Aboriginal art Provenance: Certificate of authenticity from arts centre Biography Wingu Tingima ...

Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula (c.1925-2001) Titled: « Egret Dreaming » dim: 90x155cm year 1998 Acrylic on canvas Aboriginal Art Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula (c. 1925 – February 1...

Rover Thomas Joolama (c.1926-1998) Title: "Marumaru" (Black One) Dimensions: 60x90 cm - Year: 1996 Natural pigments on linen canvas Provenance: Art Centre Warmun (Stamp back...

Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula 1925 - 2001 Born : Mintjilpirri, Kintore, NT Language group : Pintupi/Warlpiri Community : Papunya, NT Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula was born in 1925 at ...

Michael Nelson Tjakamarra (also cited as: Michael Nelson Jagamarra, or Jakamara) is a Senior Warlpiri Tribesman and an Elder of the Papunya Community in central Australia. Born c. 1949 at Pikilyi, Vaughan Springs west of Yuendumu in the Northern Territory, he grew up ‘in the bush’. His father was an important tribal elder and medicine man at Yuendumu. It was therefore automatic that he would grow up with the traditional values and knowledge that now influences his paintings. Michael lived at Haasts Bluff until his parents took him to Yuendumu for European education at the mission school. He left school at thirteen, after initiation, and worked at buffalo shooting, driving trucks, droving cattle and in the army, before returning to Yuendumu and then to Papunya to settle in 1976. He worked for a time in the Government store and for the Council. Michael learned to paint at Papunya by observing the senior men such as Billy Stockman and Old Mick Tjakamarra. Although he was tutored by his uncle, Jack Tjupurrula, Michael developed his own style and began painting earnestly from 1983. Michael is known as master desert painter for his depiction of several Dreamings in one painting. For him the understanding of the Dreaming stories that go with his paintings is all important – without the stories his paintings would ‘mean nothing’ as far as he is concerned. His Dreamings include the Possum, Snake, Two Kangaroos, Rock Wallaby, Bush Banana, Honey Ant and Yam. In 1984 Michael won the National Aboriginal Art Award with his painting ‘Three Dreamings’. His reputation as a painter rose rapidly after this. He exhibited his work in the 1986 Biennale of Sydney and featured in ‘The State of the Art’, a British art documentary. In 1987 Michael had been asked to paint a major work (27’long) to decorate the foyer of Sydney’s Opera House and he chose to paint his ‘Possum Dreaming’ story. A great highlight in Michael’s career was in 1988 when he was commissioned to design a 196 sq-metre mosaic in the main forecourt of Australia’s new Parliament House in Canberra. The work was based on his ‘Kangaroo and Emu’ dreaming. Michael was presented to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth 11...

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...

As one of the last generation to remember a childhood lived in the desert hunting and gathering with her family, Walangkura Napanangka's paintings recall the stories of country and the location of specific sites in her traditional homeland west of the salt lake of Karrkurutinjinya (Lake Macdonald). Born around 1946, at Tjitururrnga west of Kintore, in the remote and arid country between the Northern Territory and Western Australia, she lived with her father Rantji Tjapangati and mother Inyuwa Nampitjinpa and later, while still a teenager, travelled by foot with her family over the hundreds of kilometres from their remote desert home eventually joining Uta Uta Tjangala's group as they walked in to the settlements of Haasts Bluff and then Papunya. The lure of settlement life with its promise of plentiful food and water belied the harsh conversion they would make to an alien lifestyle with its many problems and unfamiliar demands. The upheaval however, was ameliorated to some degree by the proximity of her immediate family including her mother Inyuwa, adoptive father Tutuma Tjapangati, and sister Pirrmangka Napanangka (now deceased) all of whom became artists. Relocated to the community of Kintore in 1981 when the outstation movement began, Walangkura participated in the historic women's collaborative painting project (1994) that was initiated by the older women as a means of re-affirming their own spiritual and ancestral roots. It was a time of specifically female singing, ceremony and painting, away from the gaze of outsiders and men folk. The huge and colourful canvases that emerged from the women's camp were 'alive with the ritual excitement and narrative intensity of the occasion' (Johnson 2000: 197). Within a year, Papunya Tula Artists, now established at Kintore, had taken on many of these women as full-time artists, revitalising the company after the deaths of many of the original 'painting men'. While individual women forged their own stylistic trajectory, these paintings were immediately distinguishable from the men's more cerebral and symmetrical style. They radiated an exuberant and vibrant energy, the felt heart-beat of women's affinity to country and spirit. Walangkura's early works, created from 1996 onward, are characterized by masses of small markings and motifs covering large areas of canvas. Her favorite colour, a deep sandy orange predominates, accentuated against more somber blacks and reds and dusky greens or yellows. More recent works show a gestural quality though still tightly packed with an intensity of geometric line work representing sandhills. In a sense this provides a strong visual and contextual link to the men's linear style as exemplified by the works of George Tjungurrayi...