Tommy Watson
Artilanja, 2008
Acrylic on canvas, 160 x 200 cm
I attended the opening of the new Tommy Watson exhibition at Agathon Galleries last Saturday and was stunned by the richness and uniqueness of this work – here is something new in Aboriginal Art.
It’s too early for me to say if I like it all, but I see that it’s very different, and the genuine voice of an artist who has followed his internal journeys – which are always changing, yet remain firmly rooted in traditional knowledge.
Tommy evidently says, when people ask him to paint something similar to what he’s already done, that he can’t – “I’ve been there before, I can’t go back there again”. Although he began painting only in 2001 or so, and has produced only a couple of hundred paintings, he now has an international reputation.
For him the process of painting is like a meditation. He works as if in a trance – and while he does he drops in and out of song…and when he is not painting he lives as if in another world…it’s a deeply spiritual and cultural place, with his attention and consciousness turned inwards, as if in singular contact with his ancestors…his frame of mind seems to be in the same place as would be that of his people some 1000 years ago.
At the opening, the SMH critic John McDonald spoke of watching Watson working at his studio in Alice Springs, and how as he takes the paintbrush on a journey over the canvas, one that can stop or become diverted at any time. The overall effect is of interpenetrating layers of colour and rich meanderings.
Tommy was born around 1935 and is a senior Pitjantjatjara elder and Law Man. He lived a semi-nomadic life in his youth, ranging over thousands of kilometres in some of the most extreme and unforgiving regions of Western Australia. Later he was a stockman. I was particularly struck by how this man’s hard life and rich traditional knowledge has informed his work – and also struck by the seriousness with which he takes the art making process, and his desire to transmit some of the Dreaming process (though much of it remains secret). (Quotations above are taken from the gallery notes, by John Ioannou.)
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Ah, serendipity! Our current show opened last night: http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/
Installing it has been a wonderful experience, and very related to the content of your post.
That ‘s great Philip, thanks for the heads up… Sounds like a bog post is in order, it looks like a lovely show
heh, great way to see it Robert! Of course, the latest version of who we truly are is now.
On close observation of the image on your site, I felt a sense of uniqueness as if the image traced the ridges and valleys of a unique life journey, sort of like a living fingerprint, one that changes, transforms. No wonder he says he can’t go back there and paint the places he has since left. All he paints is his “now,” the latest version of self on a journey of individuation.