Waltitjata, 2005

synthetic polymer paint on linen

200 x 200 cm

Est. $60,000 – $80,000

Hammer $60,000

Provenance: Lennox Street Gallery, Richmond, Vic, Cat No. TW 0025 This work is hand-signed by the artist
Artwork story: Waltitjata names Country in the Irrunytju region of the Pitjantjatjara lands, and among Watson's titles it is among the most celebrated — a work bearing this title holds his auction record of $240,000, achieved at Lawson Menzies, Sydney, in 2007. Painted in 2005, only four years after Watson first lifted a brush, its assurance is all the more remarkable for it. A senior Pitjantjatjara elder and Lawman whose traditional names Yannima and Pikarli each encode specific sites near his birthplace at Anumarapiti, he came to painting late and without precedent in the iconographic conventions of his contemporaries, choosing abstraction as his vehicle from the outset. By 2005 he had been selected as one of eight Indigenous artists commissioned for the permanent collection of the Musée du quai Branly, Paris. John McDonald, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, described him as "a master of invention and arguably the outstanding painter of the Western Desert." Against a ground of deep saturated crimson, the composition divides into zones of distinct chromatic weight: a large magenta field anchors the left; a luminous white ovoid dominates the upper right, its interior sCattered with loose black dots recalling both rain and seed; and a cascade of orange and gold descends the right edge as though lit from within. In the lower left, a dense panel of fine white dot-work resolves into an intricate labyrinthine field, applied with a fine-tipped brush worked close to the surface, Watson's most intimate mark and the element that anchors the composition's expansive colour fields in the patient discipline of close attention.

Catalogues196 of 257

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Sale 3 · Lot 48

Yannima Tommy Watson

c.1935 – 2017

Region: APY Lands
Community: Irrunytju (Wingellina)
Language group: Pitjantjatjara

Waltitjata, 2005

synthetic polymer paint on linen

200 x 200 cm

Est. $60,000 – $80,000

Hammer $60,000

Provenance: Lennox Street Gallery, Richmond, Vic, Cat No. TW 0025 This work is hand-signed by the artist
Artwork story: Waltitjata names Country in the Irrunytju region of the Pitjantjatjara lands, and among Watson's titles it is among the most celebrated — a work bearing this title holds his auction record of $240,000, achieved at Lawson Menzies, Sydney, in 2007. Painted in 2005, only four years after Watson first lifted a brush, its assurance is all the more remarkable for it. A senior Pitjantjatjara elder and Lawman whose traditional names Yannima and Pikarli each encode specific sites near his birthplace at Anumarapiti, he came to painting late and without precedent in the iconographic conventions of his contemporaries, choosing abstraction as his vehicle from the outset. By 2005 he had been selected as one of eight Indigenous artists commissioned for the permanent collection of the Musée du quai Branly, Paris. John McDonald, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, described him as "a master of invention and arguably the outstanding painter of the Western Desert." Against a ground of deep saturated crimson, the composition divides into zones of distinct chromatic weight: a large magenta field anchors the left; a luminous white ovoid dominates the upper right, its interior sCattered with loose black dots recalling both rain and seed; and a cascade of orange and gold descends the right edge as though lit from within. In the lower left, a dense panel of fine white dot-work resolves into an intricate labyrinthine field, applied with a fine-tipped brush worked close to the surface, Watson's most intimate mark and the element that anchors the composition's expansive colour fields in the patient discipline of close attention.