Deutscher and Hackett

A founding member of Papunya Tula Artists and the youngest of the group of men who are credited with the start of the Western Desert art movement, Ronnie Tjampitjinpa’s painting career spans over 30 years. As a young man he was a participant in the 1969 film Pintubi Revisit Yumari, which documented his initiation into Pintupi law at the site of Yumari. Now removed from circulation, the film shows the re-enactment and revelation of a portion of the Yina Tjukurrpa. The experience was without doubt a formative one, resulting in Tjampitjinpa’s long-term advocacy of the outstation movement during the 1970s and eventual establishment of the Walungurru (Kintore) settlement.

It was in the 1980s that Tjampitjinpa emerged as one of the major painters of the Papunya Tula movement, described by Vivien Johnson as ‘pioneering the bold, scaled-up, linear style that came to dominate many of the Walungurru painters’ work during the 1990s’.¹ His distinctive aesthetic is exemplified by Two Boys at Wilkinkarra, the reductive composition of four Tingari roundels the product of two decades of refinement. Charting the vast terrain of the Western Desert in such deft language, the painting contains the mythology of the formation of a key site in the region.

The accompanying certificate from Papunya Tula Artists describes the subject of this work as: ‘This painting depicts an area on the east side of Wilkinkarra (Lake Mackay). In mythological times two young boys lived here under the lake. They are now represented by two conical shaped rocks. At times these young boys emerged and walked around the lake but always returned to the same place underground.’

1. Johnson, V., ‘Ronnie Tjampitjinpa’, in Perkins, H., Tradition Today, Indigenous Art in Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2006, p. 140

MERRYN SCHRIEVER