Tim Johnson visited Papunya regularly from 1980 to 1989. He met the artists, painted alongside them and later with them, and with his wife Vivien Johnson became one of the earliest collectors of Papunya Tula art. The art and experiences at Papunya gave him a set of ideas and a body of work to engage with that provided direction to his own art through that decade. The large painting Microphone was made immediately after his final trip to Papunya in 1989. On that visit he had been peripherally involved in traditional men's business which had had an unexpected negative outcome. Convention required customary justice, and as the newcomer to the group he was likely to be its target. For his own safety he was advised to leave Papunya and never return.

Back in Sydney he spent a sleepless night thinking about the events at Papunya. His art and his life had been intimately involved with Papunya for a decade, but he was unsure whether this relationship could continue. He decided to investigate Native American art as an alternative way to explore the issues at the heart of his work. He had been collecting imagery on this subject for some time, from Australian photographer Andrew Hogarth's self published books on the Plains Indians. Eventually an urgency to start a painting overcame him. He got up, went into the studio and unrolled a large sheet of linen canvas. For the first and only time in his painting life, he did not prime the canvas. Instead he went straight into the center of the canvas and painted a small image based on one of his own photographs, of he and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri painting at Papunya, Clifford in a strange black top hat.1 Imagery spiraled out from that point, a combination of women painting in the desert, the rectangles of paintings, Native American imagery and passages of direct painting, mostly in gold paint applied with his fingers. Around the top and bottom edges are rows of thangka, images that in Buddhist paintings carry an alternative narrative to the main painting. Johnson worked intensively on the painting for 24 hours until it was completed. Viewing it again in April 2015 he described the process as follows: "The painting was growing in front of me. I was excited by it, it was a continual process, an intense involvement I didn't have to think about. I was looking for something and it happened in front of me. It was like an action painting."2

Microphone was exhibited in Johnson's 1989 solo exhibition at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne, where it was purchased by gallerist Jan Minchin. In 1990 it was included in the exhibition ParaCulture, curated by Sally Couacaud at Artspace Sydney and exhibited at Artists' Space, New York in January-February 1990.

John Cruthers1. This photograph is reproduced in Tim Johnson: across cultures, University of Melbourne Museum of Art, Parkville, 1993, p 182. Conversation with Tim Johnson, Newtown, 1 May 2015