Title

Thomas, Rover.

Author

Australian Art Print Network.

Source

[Not applicable]

Publication date

2010

Type

Biography

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Rover Thomas

One of Australia’s most distinguished and influential artists, Rover Thomas began painting in the mid-1970s after a thirty year career as a stockman and labourer.

He was born near Gunawaggi in the Great Sandy Desert; his mother was a Kukatja woman and his father Wankajunga; he was ‘grown up’, in the Aboriginal way, by two fathers, Lanikan Thomas and Sundown. When he was ten his family walked 500 kilometres north to Billiluna Station, where several years later he underwent his traditional initiation.

As a consequence of the unemployment and migration caused by the equal pay ruling of the late 1960s, Thomas settled in Warmun, Turkey Creek, an Aboriginal community in the Kimberley, Western Australia. An auspicious chain of events included a revelation which came to Thomas in a dream, of the Krill Krill ceremony; a ceremony which has become synonymous with Aboriginal people of the East Kimberley. Its associated songs and pictorial imagery have been described as a cultural reaffirmation, through interpretation, of contemporary events that shroud an ancient landscape; it also led to the formation of a school of painting now recognised as distinctly that of the East Kimberley.

Mary Macha, a Perth-based art consultant was instrumental in nurturing the fledgling art movement at Turkey Creek and getting Thomas’ works into important collections.

The Gija style of Thomas’ adopted country has a figurative orientation influenced by regional rock art and ceremonial body paint designs. Thomas draws on both Western Desert and East Kimberley styles, creating a highly individual synthesis that is rare in the work of bush artists. Author Judith Ryan said of him: “Thomas is not locked inside language patterns or ritual structures of the Western desert, he looks beyond them to another world or reality and enjoys the freedom to depict this expansively.”

Thomas came to public prominence in the late 1980s when his reputation grew as his work gained wider commercial exposure. In 1989 he was included in the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s exhibition On the Edge: Five Contemporary Aboriginal Artists. In 1990 he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale, and was also awarded the John McCaughey Prize for the best painting hung that year in the Art Gallery of NSW. In 1994 he was involved in his landmark retrospective Roads Cross: The Paintings of Rover Thomas, mounted by the National Gallery of Australia.

In 1995 Thomas travelled back to his birthplace. On his return to Kununurra, he painted an impressive body of work inspired by this sojourn in Kukatja country.

His work is held in collections all over Australia as well as in the USA, Scotland and Germany.

Biography courtesy of The Australian Art Print Network, 2001.

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