Tommy Watson | 'My Country, 2016' | 111x101cm

Code: TWAHF0005

Artist: Tommy Watson

Title: My Country

Area: APY Lands, SA

Community: Pitjantjatjara

Medium: Acrylic On Canvas

Size: 111x101cm

Year: 2016

Tommy Watson's "My Country" paintings are his way of returning, again and again, to the country of his birth in the far west of South Australia. Long before he picked up a brush he had walked that land, and the rockholes, claypans and rises of the Western Desert stayed with him as colour and shape rather than as map. Each canvas in this body of work is a fresh account of that country, painted from memory and law, never from a single fixed view but from the accumulated knowledge of a place carried in the body.

Tommy Watson (c. 1935–2017) was a senior Pitjantjatjara artist from the APY Lands whose vibrant, pulsating fields of colour made him one of Australia's most celebrated Indigenous artists. He began painting in his late sixties and produced works of extraordinary spiritual energy — large-scale compositions capturing the essence of the Western Desert landscape through pure colour and movement.