Yannima Tommy Watson

Yannima Tommy Watson is a Pitjantjatjara artist born around the 1930s (between 1930 and 1935 according to sources), in the bush some 44km west of the small, isolated community of Irrunytju.

In 2001, Tommy began his career as an artist in Irrunytju (Wingellina). He was a young artist… He learned by observing other painters and drew on the experiences of a long life and the exceptional knowledge he had accumulated. But very quickly, he would find his way, a radically new style where color played a major role. Very quickly, the iconography now well known to the artists of Yuendumu, or the Western Desert, of Balgo or Lajamanu disappeared. The symbols were no longer there. As Rover Thomas, Emily Kame or Paddy Bedford had done before him, this was a true artistic revolution. For Tommy, it was not about describing his Dream (Caterpillar), the routes taken by the Ancestors. He focuses on a site, a story, sometimes very profane, the memory of a meeting, a hunting party, tries to condense his memories, the information of which he is the custodian, to add a poetic touch, sometimes melancholic and this gives a painting with a very abstract aspect. Of course what distinguishes his work is the color, very little present in the Western Desert. The red, that of the headbands of the initiates, that Tommy often wears, brings a very warm note to his compositions. Yellow, blue, orange and white, sometimes purple mauves come to mark the space, create zones and reinforce the luminosity. Collections: AGNSW, AGWA, LC, MAGNT, MQB, NGA, NGV,…