Willy Tjungurrayi

Willy Tjungurrayi was born around 1930 in the Papunya/Kintore region in the Northern Territory of Australia. He grew up in the bush and lived a nomadic hunter-gather lifestyle with his family until the late 1950’s.

Willy is renowned for painting stories from the Tingari Dreaming Song Cycle and the land around Haast’s Bluff, Lake Mackay and Lake McDonald. Some of the Tingari stories are depicted by concentric circles linked by parallel lines with the spaces between them filled with bright colours. Willy also paints wavy lines across a canvas filled with dots which represent the sandhills and a fierce hailstorm that killed ancestral Tingari men during the Dreamtime.