Never let you go

'I hope my grandfather would be quite proud, maybe smiling down on me; because I won’t let him go. I just keep carrying him on, his name and our families’ stories.'

Vincent Namatjira is a Western Arrernte man and the great-grandson of Albert Namatjira. Vincent spent his early childhood at Ntaria (Hermannsburg), the place that, in the 1930s, had inspired Albert to take up painting. When he was about eight, Vincent’s mother passed away, and he was sent to Perth to be raised in foster homes. ‘I was so lost,’ he says of his adolescence, ‘I had to figure it all out for myself’. At eighteen he returned to family and Country, then married and started painting, all of which combined to refine Vincent’s sense of himself as a keeper and exponent of his great-grandfather’s tradition. Accordingly, Vincent has made a number of self-portraits incorporating portraits of Albert – such as a photo of Albert in his truck; and paintings by William Dargie, who painted with Albert and noted his ‘tremendous inner dignity’ contributed to ‘the most wonderful face for a portrait I’ve ever seen’.