Tommy Watson

(born circa 1935)

Wangkamarl, 2003

Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Irrunytju Arts, Wingellina, Western Australia
Purchased from Aboriginal and Pacific Arts, Sydney in October 2003

EXHIBITED:
Wati Tjilpiku Tjukurpa II: Stories from the Senior Men, Aboriginal and Pacific Arts, Sydney, 11 September - 3 October 2003, cat. no. 10
Laverty 2, Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, 14 May - 14 August 2011

LITERATURE:
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Recent Painting from Australia's Remote Aboriginal Communities - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2008, p.106 (illus.)
Colin Laverty and Elizabeth Laverty et al., Beyond Sacred: Australian Aboriginal Art - the collection of Colin and Elizabeth Laverty, Edition II, Melbourne: Kleimeyer Industries, 2011, p.118 (illus.)

This painting is sold with accompanying Irrunytju Arts documentation.

TOMMY WATSON
Tommy Watson was born at Anamarapita, west of the
Irrunytju and lived a semi-nomadic life in the Gibson
Desert where he learnt bushcraft from his father; they
made spears and spearthowers, shields, boomerangs and
Watson learnt to hunt and traverse the vast expanses
the arid landscape that had defeated the first non-
Aboriginal explorers, Ernest Giles and William Gosse
some sixty years before the artist's birth. During the
1950s Anangu (Aboriginal people of the desert) were
taken off their customary lands and resettled in missions
and communities such as Warburton and Wingellina
(Irrunytju) to make way for mining, the cattle industry
and bomb and rocket testing. Many recollect the atomic
bomb testing at Maralinga.

Tommy Watson was among the first group of painters
at Wingellina when Irrunytju Arts was established in
2001. He is renowned for the chromatic range and
intensity of his paintings that are created of 'sumptuous
layers of coloured dots which ripple and surge across the
canvas suggesting contours in the landscape, dry creek
beds, plains and spinifex and tali (sand dunes)' (Knights,
M., Irrunytju Arts, Irrunytju: Irrunytju Arts, 2006, p.72).
Wangkamarl, in Watson's grandfather's country, is a
rockhole surrounded by many caves in which people
shelter during storms. In documenting this work, Watson
said 'this place copy you when you talk (echo), that's why
its called Wangkamarl. Wangka is Anangu for talk.'

Wally Caruana