Johnny Warangula Tjupurrula was a painter of light. His vision was to capture the phenomenological aspects of his Country [1] on the physical and ancestral levels. In the first three years of the Papunya movement, Warangula produced a series of paintings of the three major Water Dreaming sites - Kalipinypa, Tjikari and Ilpilli - over which he had authority, covered in native food plants and nourished by rain and rivers of freshwater. The rains had been plentiful in early 1972, creating a natural bounty that lasted throughout the southern winter when Warangula painted Water and Tucker, in the middle of the year.

According to Geoffrey Bardon’s record of the painting at the time it was made, the site is a set of low-lying ridges and claypans at Kalipinypa where the seasonal rains and storms sweep in from the west. [2] The place is renowned for the extraordinary number of lightning strikes created by Winpa, the Lightning Ancestor. The composition in the picture is an elaboration on the conventional desert iconograph for Rain or Water Dreamings: three concentric circles, representing fresh waterholes, linked by sets of three meandering lines of flowing water. In the painting, this configuration can be read vertically and laterally. The footprints of Winpa appear in the lower left quadrant. Renowned as a rainmaker, Warangula was the embodiment of Winpa, and in this respect the painting may be read as a personal record of the artist in Country.

Water and Tucker is characterised by Warangula’s unique hand in applying an endless variety of staccato dots, dashes, and stippled marks that animate the picture plane and evoke the presence of supernatural ancestral forces within the landscape. Conversely, the bold black form in lower right quadrant of the painting stands out in stark contrast: this represents a claypan at Kalipinypa.

The black claypan section of the painting offers an insight into Warangula’s painting method. A photograph of the Painting Room at Papunya taken in July 1972 by an unidentified newspaper photographer, shows the right side of the painting in an earlier state. At this stage, Warangula had depicted a figure beside a set of weapons (a spear, spear thrower and boomerang) against a black ground, and the ancestor’s footprints winding their way around within the quadrant above.

In the final version of the painting, the elements in the upper quadrant have been overpainted in patches of dotting and stippling. In the lower quadrant, the weapons and the figure have been overpainted with black at the centre, framed by sections of dotting. The outline defining the right side of the figure, up to its foot, has been retained and then extended to circumscribe the inner black claypan where now a line of white dots is superimposed over the spear. Three other lines of dotting emerge from a roundel of white concentric circles.

The artist's decision to overpaint these figurative elements may simply have been based on compositional aesthetics, a purely artistic imperative. On the other hand, mid-1972 was a time when the revelation of sacred/secret imagery, particularly figurative depictions of ancestors and ritual paraphernalia, was hotly contested among the artists at Papunya. Did Warangula overpaint these sections out of his own volition or was he pressured, directly or otherwise?

The overpainting of figures with fields of dotting has been generally accepted as a means of protecting or masking sacred and secret content within paintings. And this may be true of the approach of several artists in particular circumstances. However, the art historian and Papunya specialist John Kean argues that in fact the over-dotting enhances the vibrancy of the image to evoke ‘meteorological phenomena associated with and hence resulting in the power of the storm at Kalipinypa’, [3] and by extension, the ancestral essence present within the landscape, beneath the surface of the earth. The light within.

Water and Tucker is sold with an accompanying label from the Stuart Art Centre, together with an annotated diagram describing the story depicted. The description on the label reads: 'Water dreamings that have come true and a movement of all the root growth under the ground after the rain'.

Cf. For related works by the artist see A Bush Tucker Story, 1972, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria; Big Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, 1971, and Dreaming at Kalipinypa, 1973, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia; and Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, 1972, in the John and Barbara Wilkerson Collection; in H. Perkins and H. Fink (eds), Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales in association with Papunya Tula Artists, 2000, pp. 60, 62, 65, and 63 respectively. Water Dreaming at Kalipinypa, 1972, is also illustrated in Roger Benjamin and Andrew C. Weislogel (eds), Icons of The Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya, New York, 2009, p. 126, plate 27.

[1] 'Country’ with a capital ‘C’ indicates the ancestrally endowed land belonging to a person’s clan or language group which forms the basis of their individual and social identity.
[2] Bardon, G. and J. Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2004, p. 429.
[3] Kean, John, Dot, Circle & Frame: The Making of Papunya Tula Art, Upswell Publishing, Perth, 2023, p. 266.