Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula circa 1932-2001 WATER AND TUCKER

Painted at Papunya in 1972
Consignment number 17, Painting number 37, Stuart Art Centre, Alice Springs
Private collection
Sotheby's, Aboriginal Art, Melbourne, 25 July 2005, lot 158
The Austcorp Group Limited Art Collection

Geoffrey Bardon, and James Bardon, Papunya, A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement, Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2004, p.429, painting 394

Benjamin, R. et al, Icons of The Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings From Papunya, New York: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 2009, p.21, illustrated in the background of a photograph of the Men's Painting Room at Papunya taken in 1972 

This painting is executed in gouache on masonite and housed in a black, wooden minimalist box frame. It appears not to have had any repairs or restoration and is in very good condition overall and appears to be stable.
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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, illus.

In the first three years of the Papunya movement, Johnny Warangkula produced a series of paintings of the desert landscape covered in native food plants and nourished by rain and rivers of freshwater. Bardon states that in mid-1972, at the time this work was created, a major topic of discussion amongst the artists in the Painting Room at Papunya was the idea of painting 'my country', that for most of the artists was quite distant from the township (Bardon and Bardon, 2004:429). Warangkula painted three major Water Dreamings sites – Kalipinypa, Tjikari and Ilpilli – over which he had authority. As in this work, the series is characterised by fields of intricate brushwork where every section of the composition is meticulously detailed in layers of dotted and stippled paint. Among the artist's finest works, these paintings capture the essence of the physical richness and variety of vegetation and topographical features in the landscape at a dramatic time in the seasonal cycle, by one who knows the land intimately. Moreover, through the visually mesmerising application of layers of colour, the artist conveys the notion of the ancestral forces vivifying the landscape.

The composition is an elaboration on the conventional desert iconograph for Rain or Water Dreamings: two sets of concentric circles, representing fresh waterholes, joined by a series of meandering lines to represent flowing water. The footprints of the Water Ancestor appear in the lower left quadrant while the black area in the lower right represents a claypan.

A photograph of the Painting Room at Papunya taken in 1972 by an as yet unidentified newspaper photographer from the Herald and Weekly Times, shows the painting in progress. At this stage, Warangkula had depicted a figure beside a set of weapons (a spear, spearthower and boomerang) in the black section in the lower right which now shows the claypan. The artist's decision to overpaint these figurative elements may indicate his concern that the image was too explicit for the public domain – an issue that the Papunya artists had become acutely aware of in the early days of the movement, and which resulted in some artists using fields of dots to 'mask' sacred or secret elements in their paintings.

This painting 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'. According to the diagram, 'the roundels represent waterholes, the curvilinear lines connecting each waterhole are running water. The irregular shaped area in the top right hand corner represents a claypan, and the footprints to the bottom right of the painting represent the tracks of the Waterman.'

This painting has been requested for inclusion in the forthcoming exhibition, Origins, which is being mounted by the National Gallery of Victoria to celebrate the gallery's 150th anniversary. This exhibition is being curated by Judith Ryan of the National Gallery of Victoria and Dr Philip Batty of Museum Victoria in conjunction with Papunya Tula Artists and will bring together the largest and finest collection of early Papunya paintings executed in the 1971-1972 period. It is intended that the exhibition will tour to one or more major international institutions after its Melbourne showing.