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

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Category: Fine Art / Aboriginal Art

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