About George Ward Born 1945
George Ward Tjungurrayi is represented in major national collections including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of NSW, Supreme Court of Northern Territory, and in Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris, and Groninger Museum, Netherlands.
 
Anita Angel, art curator at Charles Darwin University, says of George Ward’s artwork, “It’s instantly recognisable, he has a style, but it’s more than just a style. He’s coming from somewhere deep within his mind’s eye to draw out what he does. He’s not experimenting, he knows exactly what he’s doing.”
 
George Ward started his painting career at Kintore around 1990. It was not until his older brother Yala Yala Gibbs died in 1998, that the full weight of cultural and ceremonial authority was transferred to George Ward. Yala Yala Gibbs was a foundation artist in the Papunya Tula Aboriginal art movement.  The art work of George Ward Tjungurrayi reflected these changes of authority, his paintings becoming more sophisticated and his style more distinctive. The dense lines that created his structures were surrounded by rows of dots that gave the paintings great power.
 
In George Ward’s larger paintings he regularly creates the Tingari or Dreaming stories from his ancestral country located to the west of Kintore and adjacent to Lake MacDonald. These stories relate the epic travels of the Creation Ancestors who brought the land and all its life forms into being as they passed across the country.  George Ward Tjungurrayi had lived close to his land all his early life before his family made contact with the white settlers, and they finally visited relatives who had joined the settlement of Papunya on the edge of the desert country.
 
In 2004 George Ward Tjungurrayi was the winner of the Wynne Prize for landscape painting at the Art Gallery of NSW. 
 
An extract from "Going to the source", 2004, April 20th, The Australian
By Nicolas Rothwell about the magic of George Ward
 
"Thin hands reach above the ox-blood expanse of stretched canvas, touching, stroking, defining space. Then, in black paint, with slow, steady pressure, George Ward Tjungurrayi marks out a set of interlocking planes. He ignores the blowing dust, the camp dogs scratching at his side, the hum of Pintupi voices, the coming and going of women and children in the Kintore painting compound. He lies on one side, wearing a well-worn red and black beanie. All day long, his arm moves at unvarying speed, as his design - his dream, his law - takes shape....
 
....A week has passed. The painting is complete, its structure so majestic and interwoven it seems to outreach the eye's capacity to see. Ward leans back, and glances down; but the artist's face is quizzical. He makes his trademark shaking movement with his painting hand. He adjusts his beanie, his long-sleeved shirt and close-fitting trousers, summons his dog-pack, and walks away. Behind him is his painted mirror of the desert: it lies gleaming on the dusty ground".