Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri | 'Carpet Snake Dreaming' | 131x31cm

Code: WDAACP

Artist: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

Title: Carpet Snake Dreaming

Area: Papunya, NT

Community: Anmatyerre

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 131x31cm

Year: Unknown

The Carpet Snake is one of the ancestral Dreamings Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri carried through both his father's and mother's country, part of the same inherited body of knowledge that gave rise to his great multi-figure canvases of the 1970s. Where those works layered many ancestral journeys across a single ground, here the Snake travels alone, its path the organising line of the whole composition, laid over the same dense dotted country that runs through his mature practice.

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri is among the most celebrated painters of the Western Desert movement and a founding figure of Papunya Tula Artists. Born at Napperby Station north-west of Alice Springs, he was an Anmatyerre man who worked as a stockman and an accomplished wood-carver before turning to painting. He began painting on board at Papunya in the early 1970s, in the years immediately following the arrival of the teacher Geoffrey Bardon, and became a director and later chairman of the artists' company. Between 1976 and 1979 he produced a sequence of monumental canvases, among them the celebrated Warlugulong paintings, that combined the sacred geometry of ceremonial ground designs with an aerial, map-like reading of country, layering multiple ancestral journeys across a single surface. This innovation transformed the scale and narrative ambition of desert painting and remains his defining contribution. His mature work is distinguished by dense, luminous dotted fields, subtle tonal veils and a rigorous underlying structure of sites and travelling lines. He exhibited internationally from the late 1980s and his paintings entered major public collections in Australia and abroad. Appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia, he was the first Papunya Tula artist honoured with a retrospective at an Australian state gallery.