Tim Johnson | 'Clifford Possum, 2003' | 150x170cm

Code: DDTJ0301

Artist: Tim Johnson

Title: Clifford Possum

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 150x170cm

Year: 2003

A meditative figure sits cross-legged at the centre of a shimmering, dot-laden field — bearded, dressed in a loose white shirt, eyes half-closed in inward attention. The figure is Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, one of the towering figures of the Western Desert painting movement, rendered here not as ethnographic subject but as fellow traveller, friend, and spiritual peer.

Around him, the canvas pulses with thousands of fine dots — a technique the artist absorbed through decades of dialogue, collaboration and friendship with Papunya Tula painters. Yet the surface also teems with miniature scenes drawn from a wider devotional imagination: tiny seated figures in prayer and meditation, lotus blossoms, mandala-like rosettes, small congregations gathered on ochre mats, processions of robed pilgrims along the lower edge. Buddhist, Hindu and Aboriginal visual languages drift together in a single luminous atmosphere.

The painter is known for exactly this kind of syncretic vision — a practice that bridges Australian desert aesthetics with Tibetan Buddhist iconography and a broader cosmology of the sacred. Clifford Possum reads as both portrait and offering: a tribute to a senior artist whose authority and presence anchor the composition, while the swirling field around him suggests the countless lives, prayers and stories that radiate outward from a single still centre.

The palette is soft and atmospheric — dusty rose, pale gold, sky blue, cream and earth — punctuated by jewel-bright flecks of orange, turquoise and crimson. Light seems to come from within the surface itself, as if the dots were particles of breath or thought. Up close, the painting dissolves into pure pattern; at a distance, the meditator re-emerges, calm and monumental.

It is a generous, contemplative work: a meeting place between two painting traditions, two friends, and two ways of seeing the world as a field of interconnected presence.