 George Ward "Tingari" Cat No. 9435 Size = 90 x 150 cm. Acrylic on Linen |
 George Ward "Tingari" Cat No. 1700 Size = 120 x 120 cm. Acrylic on linen |
 George Ward Tjungurrayi "Tingari" Cat No. 4474 Size = 100 x 120 cm. Acrylic on Linen |
 George Ward Tjungurrayi "Tingari" Cat No. 1705 Size = 120 x 150 cm. Acrylic on linen |
 George Ward Tjungurrayi "Tingari" Cat No. 10489 Size = 110 x 205 cm. Acrylic on Linen |
 George Ward Tjungurrayi "Tingari" Cat No. 10490 Size = 110 x 205 cm. Acrylic on linen |
 George Ward Tjungurrayi "Men's Ceremony" Cat No. 10251 Size = 134 x 204 cm. Acrylic on Linen |
 George Ward Tjungurrayi "Tingari" Cat No. 10258 Size = 130 x 204 cm. Acrylic on linen |
Born: c. 1940
State: WA , NT
Region: Western Desert
Community: Kintore
Outstation: Kiwirrkura, Lake Mackay, Karkun,
WalaWala, Kilpiny
Language: Pintupi
Local group:
Social Affiliation: Tjungurrayi subsection
Medium: Acrylic paint on canvas
Subjects: Tingari, Kuniya at Karrilwarra.
Awards:
2004 - winner Wynne Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Collections:
Groninger Museum, Groninger, Netherlands.
Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, Darwin, NT.
The Robert Holmes a Court Collection, Perth, WA.
The Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles, USA.
Exhibitions:
Group Exhibitions:
2002 - MERIDIAN: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
1997 - Dreampower - Art of Contemporary Aboriginal Australia, travelling exhibition,
Gallerie Australis.
1996 - Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, NT; Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne,
Vic; Araluen Art Centre, Alice Springs, NT.
1995 - Groninger Museum, Groninger, Netherlands; Papunya Tula Artists, Alice Springs, NT;
Chapman Gallery, Canberra, ACT; Utopia Art Sydney, NSW; Museum and Art Gallery of the NT.
1994 - Gallery Australis, Adelaide, SA; Dreamtime Gallery, Broadbeach.
1993 - Chapman Gallery, Canberra, ACT.
1992 - Dreamtime Gallery, Broadbeach.
1991/92, Friendly Country, Friendly People, Touring Exhibition, through Araluen Centre, Alice Springs.
Select Bibliography:
Corbally Stourton P., Songlines and Dreamings, Lund Humphries Publishers, London, UK.
Droombeelden. Tjukurrpa, (exhibition catalogue), Groninger Museum, Groninger, Netherlands.
Johnson, V., 1994, The Dictionary of Western Desert Artists, Craftsman House, East Roseville,
New South Wales. (C).
Kimber, R., Friendly Country - Friendly People (exhibition catalogue), Araluen Arts
Centre, Alice Springs, Australia, 1990.
© Discovery Media, Documentation Pty Ltd, and the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Notes:
"Going to the source",
2004, April 20th, The Australian
By Nicolas Rothwell
THIN hands reach above the ox-blood expanse of stretched canvas, touching,
stroking, defining space. Then, in black paint, with slow, steady pressure,
George Ward Tjungurrayi marks out a set of interlocking planes. He ignores
the blowing dust, the camp dogs scratching at his side, the hum of Pintupi
voices, the coming and going of women and children in the Kintore painting
compound. He lies on one side, wearing a well-worn red and black beanie. All
day long, his arm moves at unvarying speed, as his design - his dream, his
law - takes shape.
Ward, who received the Wynne Prize for landscape painting earlier this month,
is a reticent and silent Western Desert man. This cast of character can cause
the odd practical problem, now that he's become one of the nation's most admired,
and most keenly collected, artists: he's not at home in English; sees no merit
in photographs; is uneasy in big, bustling towns like Alice Springs.
"I'm a bush man, me," he insists, with a distinct, proud edge in his voice.
Ward was born, probably in the early 1950s, near the spot where the remote West
Australian bush community of Tjukurrla lies today. His father died while he was
still very young. It was only in his teenage years that he first encountered
Europeans, when a commonwealth welfare patrol came upon his family group camped by
a desert waterhole. After travelling to the government settlement at Papunya,
first home of the desert painting movement, Ward worked briefly as a fencer and
a butcher in the community kitchen. He also met and married his wife, the somewhat
formidable Nangawarra, a member of one of the desert's most dominant families.
Once their first child was born, the couple moved west to Warburton, then on
through the ranges to Docker River, to Warakurna and at last to the newly
established Pintupi capital of Kintore, in the looming shadow of Mount Leisler,
where they still spend time today.
It was here, just over a decade ago, that Ward first painted on canvas: a handful
of elegantly "classical" concentric roundel works from that time survive. But it
was only over the past three years, after the death of his brother, Yala Yala
Gibbs, a celebrated artist, that the responsibility to paint fell squarely on
Ward's shoulders. By this stage, he was a senior desert man: he lived deep in the
world of law. The canvases he began producing for Alice Springs-based Papunya Tula
Artists were like nothing else that had come before in the desert art movement:
sombre, cerebral, full of grave intellect.
National Gallery of Victoria indigenous art curator Judith Ryan quickly caught
their splendour. "He hit on this sophisticated, geometric, filled-in style almost
at once," she says. "I have the sense that he began to paint only when he was
ready, in full command of both story and country - and he seems able to harness
considerable power and visual energy almost every time he approaches a large
canvas." Once Ward has blocked out his painting's various fields, he fills each
one with parallel lines, tight-drawn. They have the feel of contours, making up
recurring patterns: wavy paths, tilted circles, chevrons. This underpainting
process can be protracted. The work still bears no resemblance to its final form.
Then he takes up his dotting stick. A transformation begins. At last, after several
days of meticulous detailing, the shimmer of the finished surface begins to show.
Ward's large-scale works depict the ancestral desert narratives, relating to the
country west of Kintore - above all, the snake-rich landscapes around Lake
MacDonald. But they are not maps, as much as expressions of a world, a logic, a
sense of how space is enlivened by spirit.
Just as the creation journeys they refer to operate on many levels, so do the
paintings: to the outside eye, they possess an austere beauty; when explained in
detail, they can serve as visual cues to a complex story-system; but all the
while their air of coherent depth comes from the underlying mental architecture
of the desert world.
This particular canvas, as the artist explains while painting, refers to an
elaborate story, also encountered in the works of various senior Pintupi figures,
most of whom have passed away. It describes journeys taken by the Tingari
ancestors - men, women, children, dogs - who once moved through the landscape,
but are all transformed, now, into rocks, or water-snakes. A cataclysmic storm
fell down upon them: black clouds, rain, lightning. Gradually, a complex
narrative emerges, which involves shifting of shapes, claypans formed by
nose-blowing, descent of figures from the sky. Many things are said of Ward's
canvases, both by him and by his immediate family.
Ward's brother-in-law, Frank, for one, advises that the artist paints some
canvases in a pinkish palette because the colour feels "strong and balanced",
while the black colour is chosen because it's "good and healthy". Then again,
black and pink stand respectively for winter and for summer landscape, and much
more. Western eyes interpret differently, and notice other things. Anita Angel,
curator of the Charles Darwin University art collection, and a prominent collector
in her own right, greatly admires Ward, while gauging his paintings largely in
formal terms. "It's instantly recognisable, he has a style, but it's more than
just a style," she says. "He's coming from somewhere deep within his mind's eye
to draw out what he does. He's not experimenting, he knows exactly what he's
doing; he has something to say about what he sees, and feels, and knows."
Angel suspects a connection between Ward's spare imagery and the incisions made
upon the material objects of desert culture: ritual items only vaguely known to
outsiders. This obscure, shielded element that so clearly lies within Ward's work
makes all the more striking his strong appeal to serious collectors of contemporary
art. Melbourne gallerist Gabrielle Pizzi, who has included significant pieces by
Ward in four recent shows, believes his work can jump the cultural divide because
of his capacity to fuse the desert tradition with an individual, almost private
quality. "He's got it," she says, "both the Pintupi grounding, and the genius to
paint in ways that are innovative and exciting. He takes desert painting to
another level. In the gallery people stop still in front of his works. They
respond to the power, the purity and the intent."
The NGV's Ryan also sees a continuing tradition beneath Ward's novel surface.
"The aesthetic's changed, the style has changed, the art's concept remains
the same," she says. "It's refined and refined over many layers, and that gives
it a reverberative shimmer, a final precision of detail. Art of this kind has
immense potency. It's not difficult at all for today's collectors to have a
passion for it, because it's minimal. It's towards the minimal edge in terms of
design, and in its lack of figuration and restricted palette."
A week has passed. The painting is complete, its structure so majestic and
interwoven it seems to outreach the eye's capacity to see. Ward leans back,
and glances down; but the artist's face is quizzical. He makes his trademark
shaking movement with his painting hand. He adjusts his beanie, his long-sleeved
shirt and close-fitting trousers, summons his dog-pack, and walks away.
Behind him is his painted mirror of the desert: it lies gleaming on the dusty ground.
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