YANNIMA TOMMY WATSON, REPRESENTED BY AGATHON GALLERIES, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, WILL BE SHOWING AT ART DUBAI 2010

Marie Geissler

Tommy Watson, Pirurpa Kalarintja Eagle Dreaming, 330 x 160cm

The Central Desert of Australia is the profound inspiration for country’s Aboriginal art, one of the most exciting and dynamic art movements of the 21st century. It is the place where nomads have lived in complete harmony with the land for thousands of years. Its unforgiving climate and remoteness is well understood by its people, and so too is its ‘truth’, metaphysical beliefs and memory called The Dreaming, which finds passionate expression in their art. For them, life and its

meaning is understood through the lens of an ancient spirituality that powerfully links each individual to the land. And for each artist, this relationship is different, determined by rights and obligations handed down to them in ceremony and story from their ancestors. It is the character of each individual relationship that defines the differences that are to be found in the art, paintings of uniquely expressive form and beauty.

The vibrant contemporary paintings of Yannima Tommy Watson reflect on his Dreaming (Dreamtime)* and through this evoke his profound and mystical connection to country, the Pitjantjatjara lands of the central deserts of Australia. These are homelands over which he has entitlement through Aboriginal law. They extend from the Uluru (Ayres Rock) south and west to Irrunytju in Western Australia. Tommy Watson is considered to be one of the most sought-after artists in Australia. Born in the central deserts of Australia around 1935, the unprecedented demand for the works of this senior law man and tribal nomad has broken the records of sale for all indigenous artists. He holds the world art auction record for a living Australian indigenous artist, and his work is held in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, as well as all major art institutions in Australia.

A pioneer in Australian indigenous art with a distinctly different abstraction, the impact of Tommy Watson’s colour is potent. He generates a depth of field and emotion using bright layers or fields of colour. Paint is applied generously, using acrylics that densely dotted in painterly or discrete linear application. Importantly, no iconographic form or colour that might give insight into sacred ritual knowledge is used. And while Watson’s totem is the Caterpillar, it is a subject about which he never speaks. Instead, the titles of his paintings describe names of rockholes, landforms or historical encounter.

Tommy Watson is a distinguished Pitjantjatjara elder and nomad, who in his youth was a supremely gifted hunter, with an intimate understanding of his country, its seasons, vegetation and animal life. This vital knowledge was passed on down to him by his family as it had be done to others, generations before, to ensure survival in some of the harshest and most arid conditions on the planet.

His artistic career began in 2002 at the Irrunytju Community Art Centre. Prior to this, his life was one of a traditional tribesman, a complex culture defined by the interaction between tribal law, supernatural beliefs and social behavior where sorcery and revenge killings were commonplace. Tommy wears scars from many spearings in his upper thighs. His parents died in his early years and he was adopted by close family members with whom he wandered the deserts. Over the next few decades the joys of his nomadic life became a thing of the past. Faced with the establishment of European settlements for mining and pastoralism, scarce resources of the desert lands were severely threatened by cattle and sheep. Tribesmen similar to Tommy were co-opted to work sporadically as stockmen and handymen. The severe drought of the fifties brought other major shifts in population. His family like many others were brought to Government settlements like Ernabella and Warburton where over half died, incapable of adjusting to the demands of this strange administrative world. Tommy returned to Irrunytju and his homelands during the 1960’s and 1970’s where he resumed a largely traditional indigenous lifestyle, a life deeply involved with tribal ceremony and his connection to land. Since 2005 he has worked exclusively with John Ioannou of Agathon Galleries in Sydney. John is an initiated man and speaks Pitjantjatjara. He is Tommy’s son through ceremony and lives with the artist in Alice Springs.

The impact of Watson’s work could well be described in terms outlined by the eminent New York art historian on the spiritual, Roger Lipsley in a discussion on the spiritual in art. He comments, “The greatest art melts and remakes us- not literally, of course, but inwardly: not permanently, but for long enough to impart the taste of a quite different state of being. Later one can’t help thinking about art that had such impact, to the point that it may alter one’s view of human identity. By the light of such art we appear to be veiled and distanced from our own core, yet at that elusive core endowed with elemental energy”.

Parallels in Watson’s position as a pioneer of a new art practise 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 the mainstream art expression of their times, Kandinsky in rejecting the limitations of realism and Watson in rejecting the restrictions associated with using the iconographic symbols of indigenous art practice. He believed like many others of his tribe that some of the earlier Papunya painters had transgressed sacred law through inappropriate use of symbol. He therefore developed his own language based on a unique use of colour, line and rhythmic dotting. This approach proved to be a liberation for his expressive technique and opened up the canvas to the expression of a potent vibrancy, emotion and depth of field in his works.

Unlike the traditional methods of Aboriginal art construction where a design or ground plan is mapped out, Watson’s approach is more spontaneous. He works intuitively and organically with paint. Sometimes he starts by working from one side of the canvas then moves to another, and at others, he develops a number of disparate areas then completes the painting by infilling the spaces between them in a manner entirely his own. 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,” an approach that reveals that he is painting from a predetermined image in his mind. Importantly, he never paints the same painting twice. His imagination seems unlimited. It is 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 the painting approach taken by him. 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.

Tommy Watson, Wati Kutjara, 100 x 200cm

According to Judith Ryan, senior curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria, Watson produces work that is inward and liturgical which, in common with the early boards of the Pintupi men, exhibits 'incandescence'. His canvases comprise layers of dotted colour intricately worked like a tapestry or patchwork. Bright geometries, they are visually spectacular mind maps, which evoke the land as if seen in aerial view. And similar to European master Paul Klee, Watson delights in taking “a line for a walk”, one that ends abruptly, disappearing mysteriously as if in mid sentence. “As a point wandering through space: this spare and tantalizingly suggestive line, evokes at once 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. At times they interpenetrate others of different colour, at others diverge, taking a different meandering route, perhaps channeling mindscapes of country and metaphysical memory.

Alternatively, his lines appear like tracks, following the journeys of the ancient spirits, appearing and disappearing on the surface of the canvas, simulating the spirit journeys of the Dreamtime when they surfaced then re-entered the land in the journeys described in their epic myths of the ancient past.

Tommy Watson gives us a merging of country, journey, memory and Dreaming with a confidence and drama that is both surprising and visually tantalizing. His paintings resonate with the authority of the artist’s intimate historical and spiritual knowledge of place.

 

 

* The Aboriginal Dreaming refers to cultural beliefs, which have been handed down through oral and ceremonial tradition for some 40,000 to 60,000 years. According to the Dreaming, the actions of Spirit Beings who at the beginning of Creation, emerged from beneath the land and fashioned its topography and made 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 that are known as The Dreamings and which are also believed to be operating today.


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