Tommy Watson was a distinguished lawman from the remote deserts of Western Australia whose aesthetic vibrancy and dotted innovative expression pushed the boundaries of ‘abstraction’ within contemporary Aboriginal painting, and like few others before him at the time, produced work that found visual resonance with the Abstraction Expressionism of Western painting. Watson’s work along with seven other Aboriginal artists was commissioned for permanent exhibition for the opening of the prestigious Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. His work Wipu rock hole, 2006 was scaled up and reproduced on stainless steel tiles that adorn a ceiling within the Museum.
Watson commenced painting with Irrunytju Arts in 2001, and as one of the founding artists at the centre determined to reinvigorate their culture through his contemporary painting, where he applied the knowledge he had learnt about this process in previous years when visiting Papunya painters. He had met Uta Uta Tjangala, Shorty Lungkata Tjungurrayi and Anatjari 111 Tjakamarra and had joined many such artists over the years when undertaking men’s ceremony with them. Nyakul Dawson, Patju Presley, Tjuruparu Watson and Clem Rictor formed his men’s group at Irrunytju, and their works were amongst those from his region to be described as paintings with “expansive colour fields and liturgical linear structures.”
Watson’s early style adopted the Papunya-styled geometric ordering of the canvas and the use of symbolic form to map out his narrative. Concentric circles described sacred waterhole sites and precise linear dotting – ancestral journey lines, ceremonial grounds, ancestral presence and landforms. He also deployed an all-over dotting technique as background infill for Country, using it as an overlay to disguise sacred content painted beneath which gave ancestral potency to the work, in the manner pioneered by Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula. Watson was part of the Colour Power Aboriginal art movement that was developed by Western Desert artists from 1984 to 2004.
Later, with larger scaled works, his geometric figuration gave way to a more spontaneous, layered and dramatic expression. Shapes were more free-form and expanded, the cavasses now structured by interpenetrating, pulsing fields of varying colour that were interrupted by linear flows. Sometimes these were singular straight-line trajectories, conveying ancestral journey, their exquisite linear placement finding evocative parallel in works by Paul Klee who like Watson takes “a line for a walk”. For Watson, however this was not just a matter of demonstrating “a point wandering through space”, but a means of signifying ancestral journey across Country, symbolically detailing the place at which the Ancestor surfaced from, or disappeared into the ground.
While Watson’s paintings refer to his mother’s Dreamings Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters) and Minyma Tjuta (Two Sisters) as well as those of his grandfather, their titles usually refer to places. They include Umutju, Uluru, Anumarapiti, Walpanja, Utjantja, Wulpa, Waltitjata, Walunja, Wangamari, Artilanja, Wipu - a rock hole, Iyarka - a lake, Walu - a rock face, Kapi Piti - a soakage, Kulpitjara and Kulpi Kulpi - a whirlwind, Utjuri Pukara, - a sandhill shrub, Wankarmaralkji - a cave, Pirurpa Kalarintja and Kurkutjara - a sacred place near Irrunytju where he was born around 1935.
Watson was orphaned at ten years old, was raised by Nicodemus Watson. He married Ruby Mundurru and had no children. He worked as a stockman at Mount Ebenezer and Mulga Park Station, then as a handyman at Yuendumu and Papunya. He met Albert Namatjira.
In 2005 his work was exhibited at Wollongong City Art Gallery and the Cairns Regional Art Gallery, in 2006 in Colour Power at the National Gallery of Victoria, in 2007 in One Sun One Moon. Aboriginal Art in Australia at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2009 in Emerging Elders – honouring senior Indigenous artists at the National Gallery in Canberra, in 2016, in Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, Harvard Art Museums, USA. In 2004 his first solo exhibition, Tommy Watson was with Aboriginal and Pacific Arts in Sydney.
Courtesy of Marie Geissler 2024
