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Dimensions: 183 by 153 cm

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Provenance: Painted at Kiwirrkura for Papunya Tula Artists
Private collection, Melbourne

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Notes: In 2004, George Ward won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, only three years after he had commenced painting professionally. Born around 1950, the younger brother of the renouned Pintupi painter Yala Yala Gibbs (c.1925-98). George Ward started painting on canvas when he and his family moved to Kintore, in the early 1990s. He only painted sporadically for Papunya Tyula Artists until 2001. After his influential brother's death, George Ward, armed with the traditional knowlegde gained through a succession of ritual activity, was prepared to assume his reponsibility to paint his family's ancestoral lands around Lake MacDonald on the Northern Territory/ Western Australia border.

George Ward compositions do not resemble maps of the landscape, rather they reflect a sense of the atmosphere, both spiritual and physical of the country. His combination of concentric repeated and varied forms, and layers of fine dotting produce surfaces of beguiling complexity and dispay an authority gained through ceremony.

For an appreciation of the artist's paintings on the occasions of his Wynne Prize award, see Rothwell, N, 'Going to the source', The Australian, 20 April 2004.