Tommy Watson

by Marie Geissler

Director, Agathon Galleries Sydney



‘Aboriginal artist Tommy Watson is in a class of his own holding the auction record for a living indigenous artist at $240,000.Collectors the world over acknowledge his genius with sales of Watson’s paintings over the past three years exceeding that of $5 million.’



Tommy Watson’s dealer, John Ioannou Director Agathon Galleries Melbourne Sydney





‘Watson is a master of invention and arguably, the outstanding painter of the Western Desert ….Each painting tells a specific story, but the most impressive feature is the artist's use of colour…. Like Matisse, Watson knows that one may have warm and cool shades of red, warm and cool shades of blue. But he knows this instinctively, without any formal training. What he knows cannot be verbalised, and cannot be taught, yet no one could see these paintings and not be convinced of their profundity.’ 



John McDonald, art critic Sydney Morning Herald





Regarded by collectors and curators as being in the top echelon of contemporary Australian painting, Watson’s work has also received substantial critical acclaim.”



Margot Neale Adjunct Professor, Principal Advisor to the Director and Senior Curator (Indigenous) National Museum of Australia, Canberra





Irrunytju artist Yannima Tommy Watson began his painting career in 2001. At this time contemporary desert art in Australia was already regarded as one of the country’s,if not the nation’s, most exciting art movement of the 20th century. Distinguished artists that have championed this profile included painters like Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi, Mick Namararri Tjapaltjarri, Tim Leura Tjapaptjarri, Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Anatjarri Tjakamarra, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri,  Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi, Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Charlie Tarawa Tjungurrayi, Old Walter Tjampitjinpa, Uta Uta Tjangala, Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie and Emily Kame Kngwarreye.



Seeding this extraordinary outpouring of indigenous talent were paintings from the remote Central Desert outstation of Papunya in the Northern Territory. They were inspired by the sacred iconography which was used in desert sand paintings and body decoration when undertaking the ancient ceremonial practices of indigenous Dreamings. Under the direction of Papunya school teacher, Geoffrey Bardon, the Honey Art Dreaming mural for the walls of the local school building was the first major collaborative work. It was followed by over a thousand individual paintings on board. Shortly thereafter, canvases became the medium of choice whilst news of the success of the Papunya art movement spread like wildfire through the desert. New art centres were launched, each region adding its own distinct style to the mix.



The legacy of these first 30 years were paintings that gave visual form to a culture that had been handed down through oral and ceremonial tradition for some 40,000 to 60,000 years. The paintings reflected on the Dreaming and the actions of Spirit Beings who at the dawn of Creation, emerged from beneath the land fashioning its topography and creating all living things. Indigenous legend tells of their epic journeys, their making of mountains, rivers, caves, plains, billabongs and lakes. Importantly, all things within this time were interconnected and their narratives understood within highly defined sacred spiritual and moral parameters known as The Dreamings. These Dreamings are said to be operating today.



Distinguishing the work of Tommy Watson from other artists, is his stunning colourful abstraction where his celebration of and relation to country is generated using bright layers of thickly applied acrylic paint that are densely dotted in painterly or linear application. Importantly, no iconographic form or colour that might give insight into ritual knowledge is used. Furthermore, while Watson’s totem is Caterpillar, it is a subject about which he never speaks. Instead, the titles of his paintings describe place names or encounters of personal and private significance. These include sites in his red desert homelands, which are to be found scattered throughout the thousands of square miles that track south and west from Uluru in the Northern Territory to Irrunytju in Western Australia.



Locations include Umutju, Uluru, Anumarapiti, Walpanja, Utjantja.  Wipu is a rockhole, Iyarka names a lake, Walu a rock face, Kapi piti a soakage, Kulpitjara and Kulpi kulpi a whirlwind, Utjuri Pukara, a sandhill shrub with honey dew  and Wankarmaralkji a cave. Reference to country around Irrunytju where he was born in 1935 include titles such as Waltitjata, Pikarli, Anumarapiti, Anumarapiti Ngayuku Ngura .  Other titles include Kungkalrakampa or Seven Sisters Dreaming – the great women’s dreaming of his mother’s lands, Pangkalangu Panaka, which refers to the giant hairy man eaters who live in caves and Mamu mara, a place where the treacherous mamu sprits are known to reside.



Celebrated for its universality of appeal, the deep spirituality that underpins Tommy Watson’s abstraction can be said to parallel in some ways the abstraction of western artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, for whom religious reference was all important and whose ‘abstract style was generated out of more than superficial considerations’ and fostered ‘the perception that the work was deeply serious and indeed profound in motivation’. Parallels in Watson’s position as a pioneer of a new art practice can be made with artist Wassily Kandinsky who like Watson, created a brilliant abstraction of his own inspiration.  Both chose a language that went beyond the accepted art forms of mainstream art expression, Kandinsky in rejecting the limitations of realism and Watson in rejecting the restrictions of using iconographic symbols of indigenous art practice.

Watson’s colour which is described as ‘incandescent’ by Judith Ryan, Indigenous Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, is applied with dramatic yet subtle impact using various combinations and tones. An important aspect of its appeal are the works spatial complexity and the distinctive and tactile topographical variety described through using luscious, thickly dotted layers of bright pink, white, yellows, oranges, reds, purples, blues and green. In expressing the intensity of his relationship to country, Watson infers the potent and mysterious dimensions of his sacred world by sinking the visual elements into what becomes ‘  a prolonged meditation on art and life, space, time, perception and the nature of reality itself.... ‘

And like European master Paul Klee, Watson delights in taking ‘a line for a walk’, one that ends abruptly or disappears mysteriously. ‘As a point wandering through space’ this tantalizingly suggestive linear evokes a sense of the Unknown or dreamlike fantasy in the case of Klee or in the case of Watson, and to the curious viewer, the unfathomable realms of the artist’s Dreaming. This linear dotting also makes its impact as streams of surging parallel lines. Sometimes they interpenetrate others of different colour, at others diverging, taking a different meandering route, perhaps channelling mindscapes of country and ancient memory.



One of the great visual delights of Watson’s work however comes from small surprises, the often miniscule sections of colour that peep through from behind the dotted foreground. Here it is the glimpse that tantalizes and captivates, presenting viewers with an empty vessel into which their own meaning can be poured.



Today, Watson paints at his studio in Alice Springs. He works from a seated cross legged position. Moving across the canvas rhythmically and purposefully expressing sensitive reflection and confident articulation of his connection to subject and place. Watson works intuitively and organically sometimes constructing the space in advance with graphic lines that later are in filled with colour, at others, painting small objects and roundels in discrete places over the surface, later to be overlayed or disguised. He is known to say to onlookers: “It doesn’t look good now… but when all places come together and it will be very good”.



 Importantly, he never paints the same painting twice. ‘His imagination seems unlimited. It’s painful for him to comprehend the idea of repeating something he has done before, let alone do it. When questioned by others who have asked him to so something similar for them, he has replied: “I’ve been there before, I can’t go back there again” ‘.



These statements reveal the integrity of the artist, and the essential nature of his approach to painting. For Watson, each time he produces a work he is visiting a new experience. He says:

“I paint from my heart. I can’t do those works again like some other fellas; it can’t be real Dreaming if I do.”’ This is evident in his works…and while he returns to a subject over and again, the paintings with the same name are always visually different, Watson always gives us a new chapter or version.



Prior to his career as an artist, Tommy enjoyed informal relationships with the desert painting of the early Papunya Tula painters of the seventies and eighties, and was well versed in how and why they painted. He went to Papunya in his youth and remembers the work of Uta Uta Jangala, Shorty Lungkata and Anatjari Jagamara. Watson was amongst the founding members who in 2001 came to paint at the small corrugated iron shed that was the painting room at Irrunytju. Nyakul Dawson, Patju Presley, Tjuruparu and Clem Rictor formed his men’s group. With them he learnt how to use the acrylic paints and brushes of western art practice. They felt an urgency to pass on their own stories, and record them for posterity like other artists of the desert had done. They saw paintings as an agent for revitalisation and reinvigoration of sacred knowledge for the younger members of their community. They also saw the commercial rewards for success.



Tommy Watson is a senior Pitjantjatjara elder and law man, (Karimara skin group), born around 1935 at Anamarapiti, a homeland 75 kilometres south of the present day community of Irrunytju (Wingellina) in Western Australia, one of the country’s most arid regions. As a young man Watson lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle with his family, walking thousands of kilometres from waterhole to waterhole. Their country was in the western reaches of the Gibson Desert which missionaries entered when he was a young man. Over this time he absorbed vital information about where drinking water and various sources of nutrition could be found.



Watson learnt where he could find pinangu, transient pools of surface water; tjintijira (claypans); warku (rainwater collected in rocky holes and crevices); and hidden soakages such as tjurnu (soakages in dry creek beds) and yenta (wells). From the women he learnt where to find  kampurarpa ( desert raisin), ili ( figs), maku (wood grubs), minkulpa (native tobacco), tjala (honey ant), tinka (lizard), nginaka (goanna), wayanu (Quandongs) arnguli (plum) and grass seeds which are ground and made into seed cakes. From his father he learnt now to use the coals of the fire to make spears by straitening the thin branches of Tacoma bushes, from others to build wiltja ( shade structures) and yuu (wind shelters), to carve spears, woomera and shields from sections of mulga trees and hunt malu (kangaroos), putj (feral cats), kalaya ( emu) and kipara ( bush turkey). He learned how to survive in the desert and the teachings about relationship of country to men’s Tjukurpa.



During the early settlement period, members of his Pitjatjantjara tribe settled to the west in areas near Warburton, and to the east around Ernabella in South Australia. A turning point came in the 1970’s with  many returning to their traditional land around Irrunytju, situated ten kilometres from the tri-state borders of Western Australia, Northern Territory and South Australia.



As an adult Watson became a stockman at Mount Ebenezer, then Yuendumu where he established an enviable reputation as a  feared warrior as well as horseman, mustering horses, camels and donkey. He later returned to his homelands to live a largely traditional indigenous lifestyle, a life deeply involved with ceremony and his connection to land.



Today Watson divides his time between his home at Kaltukatjarra, Irrunytju, his homelands and Alice Springs where he lives with his family and dealer John Ioannou director of Agathon Galleries in Sydney and Melbourne. Ioannou is a fluent Pitjantjatjara speaker and initiated Law man who has been adopted by Watson as his son through ceremony. He met Watson at Warakuna in May 2005 and his highly successful dealer relationship with Watson started not long after that and has continued through till today.

Watson paints stories from both his mother’s and grandfather’s country. Tommy’s mother died when he was very young and her dreaming stories in country south west of Warakurna, are a very important source of his painting content. He is very emotional about her dying young and was taught her Dreamings from her relatives. ‘My grandfather’s country, grandmother’s country. When they were alive, they would take me around the country, when I was a kid. That’s why we look after country, go out whenever we can. See if the rockholes are good.’ 

His mothers Dreamings to which Tommy refers include the Seven Sisters, Kungarangkulpa    (Minyma Tjuta) Dreaming, a narrative that exists in many forms through Aboriginal Australia. The Seven Sisters tells of a journey that begins in the deserts in Western Australia and extends through several different language areas to the South Australian Pitjantjatjara country.

Watson’s most important ancestral story is Bush Turkey. This narrative concerns an epic confrontation between two great ancestral beings, the Emu and the Kangaroo. Watson also paints a Great Flood narrative, a tale which relates to the melting of ice in the central desert region 10,000 years ago, a time when the waters from the south rose and flooded the lands north of the Great Australian Bight in South Australia, only then to recede. He also paints about the pink man eaters from the north east, tall people who practiced cannibalism and the various tribal battles between the Pitjantjatjara and the Yankunyatjarra. There are also paintings associated with Ayres Rock and the Olgas including the flooding of the big water hole or lake between Ayres Rock and Mount Connor.



Tommy Watson starred in the recent United Kingdom Channel 4 documentary on the Aboriginal arts industry in Australia. He was interviewed in his homelands and filmed painting in his country. The film premiered in late September of 2008 in England.

Tommy Watson was one of eight Australian indigenous artists to be celebrated for their high achievement as artists when his work was selected for permanent exhibition at the prestigious Musee de Quay Branly in Paris in 2007. His work Wipu rockhole  (2006) was scaled up and reproduced on stainless steel tiles which adorn a ceiling within the Museum.  In Australia, the confirmation of his extraordinary talent was achieved when his Waltitjata set an all time secondary art auction record for the work of a living aboriginal artist when it was sold for $240,000 in 2007.

Tommy Watson’s dealer, Director of Agathon Galleries John Ioannou: “Tommy is a perfectionist and the value of his painting as investment lies in the fact that he has only ever produced 150 or so major works. Tommy regards these as (aboriginal) ‘painting his country’… ‘Beautiful country’.

John Ioannou continues: “For him the process of painting is like a meditation. He works as if in a trance…dropping in and out of song….when alone with me it relates to men’s ceremony, never to be heard by women……and when he is not painting he lives as if in another world…it’s a deeply spiritual and cultural place, with attention and consciousness turned inwards, as if in contact with his ancestors….his frame of mind is still in the same place as would be that of his people some 1000 years ago. When he travels through the lands he will recount stories of his travels to women. With only select men present he will recount stories of his ancestors.”

Tommy Watson is an internationally distinguished pioneer of contemporary indigenous abstraction in Australia with a genius that lies in the seamless artistic finesse with which he merges both his country and Dreaming. Miraculous imaginative expressions, his paintings resonate with the authority of his intimate and spiritual knowledge of place.

Exhibitions

2009 Nganmapa Ngura (My Country) Irrunytju Artists, Linton and Kay Fine Art, Perth

2009 New Works: South Western Desert Art of Australia, Agathon Galleries Sydney, Melbourne

2009 Nganampa Tjukurpa: South Western Desert Art of Australia, Agathon Galleries Sydney

2009 Agathon Galleries Sydney, Melbourne

2008 Agathon Galleries Sydney, Melbourne

2008 2003, 2002 Selected for Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award

2007 Musee du Quai Branly, Paris (permanent exhibition)

2007 One Sun, One Moon, Art Gallery of New South Wales, NSW

2007 Tommy Watson Solo Exhibition Agathon Galleries, NSW

2007 Senior Irrunytju Artists  Agathon Galleries, VIC

2007 Irrunytju Fundraiser Exhibition Agathon Galleries, NSW

2006 Tommy Watson Solo Exhibition Agathon Galleries, VIC

2006 ‘Landmarks’, National Gallery of Victoria, VIC

2006 Musee du Quai Branly  Paris, FRANCE

2005 Cairns Regional Art Gallery, QLD

2005 Wollongong City Art Gallery, NSW

2005 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Gallery, VIC

2005 Ngayuku Ngura – My Country, Vivien Anderson Gallery, VIC

2005 Senior Irrunytju Men, Aboriginal and Pacific Gallery, NSW

2004 NATSIAA – ‘Celebrating 20 Years’, National Archives of Australia, ACT

2004 Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, SA

2002/2003/2008 Finalist in Telstra National aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards



Collections

•    Musee du Quai Branly Paris

•    Art Gallery of NSW

•    National Gallery of Victoria

•    National Gallery of Australia

•    Western Australian Art Gallery

•    South Australian Art Gallery

•    Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

•    Elizabeth and Colin Laverty

•    Patrick Corrigan



   

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