Papunya Tula is a settlement established by the Australian government in the late 1950s for Aboriginal people who had moved from the desert. A contemporary art movement was founded there in 1971 that continues as an artists’ cooperative today. Johnny Warangkula Tjupurrula was one of the first Papunya Tula men to adopt the dotting and over-dotting painting technique, used in part to capture the energy of movement and in part to obscure sacred knowledge. The sophisticated language of Papunya Tula painting is rooted in a collective effort to sustain traditions while adapting to the global economy. By incorporating traditional iconography and designs into Western-style paintings destined for the international art market, senior men encoded and asserted their culture on canvas. Some of the first paintings they produced contained sacred knowledge that should not have been revealed to outsiders. Realizing the consequences of publicity, artists painted over sensitive elements in previous paintings and began to paint children’s stories, which were open to all members of the community.

Tjupurrula was a custodian of a key site of the Water Dreaming and painted this composition abiding by that general rule. On the left, there are two young children watching a ritual elder dance surrounded by ceremonial objects. Dense patterns of dots, circles, sinuous bands, and parallel lines fill the canvas. Tjupurrula’s innovative and intuitive compositions often run out of the frame, “creating an irresolution of meaning and form,” though a consistent and powerful aesthetic. The white tracks describe watercourses, the concentric circles recall water holes or soaks, and the smaller lines denote running water.Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, de Young 125 (California: Cameron + Company, 2021), p. 162, entry by Christina Hellmich.