Tjapanangka was born in 1929 near Lake MacDonald on the Northern Territory – Western Australia border near his father’s country of Lupul (Frederick Range). He speaks the Ngaatjatjarra language, and as a child travelled by foot with his family across vast stretches of desert from Lupul on the border of Western Australia to Areyonga, a small Aboriginal community south east of Alice Springs. After his father was killed in tragic circumstances the family returned to Lupul.
Long Tom got work as a stockman on several cattle stations and was also a police tracker. It was in this Papunya/Haasts Bluff region that he was to spend most of his time, except for a small time spent in the Port Augusta prison.
The establishment of Haasts Bluff as a cattle station in 1954 meant that Long Tom would find work as a stockman, the area was well known to Long Tom because as a prisoner, he helped to build fences around the land surrounding Haasts Bluff. Like many others who had come in from the desert and had traditional hunting skills, Long Tom was recruited to assist the police force.
After a spell doing this he then returned to Haasts Bluff to be reunited with his wife and return to the work that he most enjoyed, that of a stockman.
Today he has two wives – Marlee Napurrula and Mitjili Napurrula. He has two children with Marlee. In the early days they would move about the country a lot, but have settled down since they started painting about the end of 1993.
Long Tom is a good man with a good sense of humour, enthusiasm and fresh new ideas.
The following article is an extract from Tradition Today – Indigenous Art in Australia – Art Gallery of New South Wales. Hetti Perkins wrote the detail.
Long Tom Tjapanangka and his first wife Marlee Napurrula began painting for the Ikuntji Women’s Centre in late 1993, In recent years, Tjapanangka has also collaborated with his second wife, Mitjili Napurrula. Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff) is about 230 kilometres west of Mparntwe (Alice Springs) in the land of the Luritja people. The ancient ranges that dominate the landscape around the community offer a spectacle of rich natural beauty and immense ceremonial significance.
At the time of the proclamation of Haasts Bluff Aboriginal Reserve in 1940, Ikuntji was a ration depot. For Warlpiri, Pitjantjatjara, Pintupi and Arrente people, it offered refuge from the harsh droughts of the early twentieth century, pastoral incursions into Aboriginal lands and the terror of the Conniston massacre. Today, the Ikuntji Arts Centre organizes bush trips for the artists and their families back to the homelands. These journeys are a source of inspiration for painting and an opportunity to affirm traditional links with the land.
Tjapanangka’s paintings celebrate the striking topography of the country he traveled through as a young man while working as a stockman and police tracker. The artist’s stated intent is to paint for “everyone”, rather than making works of implicit sacred significance. Tjapanangka’s method is akin to that of his contemporaries Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Kutuwulumi Purawarrampatu and Rover Thomas. Like the two distinguished women artists, Tjapanangka is diffident in the face of scrutiny from outsiders as to the “meaning” of his work. And, like the late Rover Thomas, he lives and works as an artist far away from his birthplace on the Northern Territory and Western Australian border.
The inherent elusiveness of Tjapanangka’s works is a direct contrast to their formal pictorial vigour. Although the abstract forms of tali (sandhills) and puli (rocks) that recur in Tjapanangka’s paintings are features of the desert landscape, his artistic tendency towards the figurative is anomalous to classic Western Desert painting. His technique also diverges from that of the neighbouring Papunya Tula artists – his dense, clotted application of paint evokes a palpable sense of country. Tjapanangka’s paintings present an idiosyncratic fusion of artistic influence that reflects the dynamism and cultural hybridity of the Ikuntji community.
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