Rover Thomas

“Rover Thomas held strictly to the belief that one was to ‘paint country with country’. Although artists in other remote communities were painting with acrylic paints, East Kimberley artists continued using ochre, pigments and naturally occurring gums and resins as they had used them in rock paintings, ceremonies and the adornment of objects before European settlement. Rover Thomas commenced his painting practice in the early 1980s. His hybrid style, which featured a reinvention of East Kimberly traditional work, was developed through his travels across the expansive terrain of the East Kimberley as a stockman far from his own Country of the Kukatja-Wangkajunga people. Drawing together different places aligned to his mother and father’s Country, Rover Thomas tells their stories with broad areas of naturally sourced colour from underground, red from the burnt red ochre or haematite, yellow from the limonite and white from the kaolin clays, gypsum calcite or burnt selenite.” (Vanessa Merlino and Luke Scholes, 60 over 50: 60 Paintings from 50 Years of Australian First Nations Art, 2023, p. 14)

Rover Thomas: Wangkajunga/Kukatja language group, circa 1926-1998

Rover Thomas Wangkajunga/Kukatja language group, circa 1926-1998

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