Hubert Pareroultja painting West MacDonnell Rangers near Alice Springs, 2024. Acrylic on linen, 240 x 490cm. Courtesy: the artist and Nanda\Hobbs, Sydney.

Hubert Pareroultja is a Western Arrarnta man. He has always lived in this land and his understanding of the landscape is absolute—he knows every nuance of it. He paints it the way he sees it—the twist of a ghost gum, every colour change on the ancient ironstone as the sun passes over the valleys, and the sand of the dry Finke River that meanders past Hermannsburg.

Pareroultja’s father Reuben, and uncles Otto and Edwin, were leaders of the Hermannsburg School of watercolour painters—the first desert painting movement in the 1930s—a legacy that continues to this day. Hubert’s mother, Janice, was sister to Rubina who married the great Albert Namatjira. It was Namatjira who taught the Pareroultja brothers to paint. Their vision of the West MacDonnell Ranges, or Tjoritja, would ultimately change the direction of Australian art. It is through their hand that the world would begin to understand and accept the deep significance of the oldest continuing culture.

Pareroultja’s meticulous eye, and sense of the subtleties of colour translated through watercolour, is now collected and recognised world-wide. In 2020, he won the prestigious Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of NSW.

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