George Ward Tjungurrayi
George seems able to harness considerable power and visual energy almost every time he approaches a canvas. Ward's works depict the ancestral desert narratives, relating to the country west of Kintore - above all, the snake-rich landscapes around Lake MacDonald - not maps, but expressions of a world, a logic, a sense of how space is enlivened by spirit. George Ward Tjungurrayi was born near the spot where the remote West Australian bush community of Tjukurrla lies today. His father died while he was still very young. It was only in his teenage years that he first encountered Europeans, when a commonwealth welfare patrol came upon his family group camped by a desert waterhole. After travelling to the government settlement at Papunya, first home of the desert painting movement, where he met and married his wife, formidable Nangawarra, a member of one of the desert's most dominant families. Once their first child was born, the couple moved west to Warburton, then on through the ranges to Docker River, to Warakurna and at last to the newly established Pintupi capital of Kintore, in the looming shadow of Mount Leisler, where they still spend time today. It was here, just over a decade ago, that Ward first painted on canvas: a handful of elegantly "classical" concentric roundel works from that time survive. But it was only over the past three years, after the death of his brother, Yala Yala Gibbs, a celebrated artist, that the responsibility to paint fell squarely on Ward's shoulders. By this stage, he was a senior desert man: he lived deep in the world of law. The canvases he began producing for Alice Springs-based Papunya Tula Artists were like nothing else that had come before in the desert art movement: sombre, cerebral, full of grave intellect. 2004 Wynne Prize winner, Art Gallery of New South Wales, George is found in many collections world-wide, like the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, Darwin, Groninger Museum, Netherlands, The Robert Holmes a Court Collection, The Kelton Foundation, Los Angeles, USA