Old Man's Dreaming

Uta Uta Tjangala was one of the first and most prominent of the Western Desert painters: first, because his drawings on paper at Papunya in 1971 helped to inspire the teacher Geoffrey Bardon to encourage the men there to paint, and prominent because he became a leading exponent and elder statesman of the resultant Western Desert painting movement.

The scale of his giant 1983 painting Old Man Dreaming captures Tjangala’s confidence at the time, due to the movement’s surging success and his recent relocation from Papunya to his homeland, as well as the epic nature of its underlying narrative. It depicts an ancestral story from his birthplace, Yumari, an important rockhole site in Dover Hills in Western Australia. There a man had illicit sex with a woman of the wrong skin group and, as punishment, suffered painful enlargement of his sexual organs. The painting shows six standing stones in an outcrop near Yumari, two of which represent the transgressors.

Barry Patton, Tarnanthi Writer & Researcher