Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri circa 1929-1984

Acquired directly from the artist at Papunya by Geoffrey Bardon in January 1978
Private collection, New South Wales
Sotheby's, Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 26 July 2004, Lot 102
Private collection, France

Andrew Sayers, Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 3 December 2008 - 1 March 2009

Andrew Sayers, Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2008, pp.15-16, p.17, illus.

Ryan and Batty, Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art, NGV, 2011, p.55, illus.

Housed in a minimalist wooden box frame with some very minor chips on the two upper corners and on the left hand edge 15cm from the upper corner. With minor area of rubbing on the pale pink shield to the right of the right hand figure. No repairs or restoration. Pigment stable overall.
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Philip Batty, Senior Curator, Anthropology at Museum Victoria, writes: "Tim Leura occasionally used skeletons to honour his deceased patrilineal relatives; Father/Son/Grandfather Dreaming 1978 is just such a painting. While from a western viewpoint the skeleton represents annihilation, in such works he is referring to his father and grandfather as living men of his memory, showing them with their spears and spear-throwers, emblems of their manhood." (Ibid. p.55)

Wally Caruana writes that, “The interplay between the artist’s knowledge, land, family and kin relationships and life story is clearly demonstrated in Tim Leura’s painting Father/Son/Grandfather Dreaming c.1978. Two skeletal figures traverse a landscape of sand and grass rendered as fields of dots in greys, blacks, white and tones of red ochre. They are hunting euro (kangaroo) therefore, their spears and spear-throwers are shown. The central figure represents Leura’s father (a man of the Tjungurrayi kinship group), that on the left, his grandfather (a Tjapaltjarri man, like the artist). They are represented again in the traditional symbolism of Desert painting as the parallel arcs surrounding a set of concentric circles to the right in the painting. Here the roundel represents a fireplace; the upper arcs indicate the artist’s father, that on the right his grandfather, and the lower set of arcs the artist himself. The men are talking about hunting according to the strict protocols between grandfather, father and son.

Tim Leura made Father/Son/Grandfather for Geoffrey Bardon, a school teacher who in 1971/2 brought the artists at Papunya together to begin to paint their own stories and country. Bardon was very close to Leura and he drew attention to an ‘extraordinarily autobiographical’ quality in the artist’s work.” (Sayers, op. cit., pp.15-16)