Fred WILLIAMS
Australian 1927–82
worked in England 1952–56
In 1964 the art critic Wallace Thornton wrote in his Sydney Morning Herald review of Fred Williams’s recent exhibition:
What a magnificent painter Fred Williams is! There is every chance he will go down in history as Australia’s greatest landscape artist … Williams clarifies our vision, develops our understanding, defines our land.
While these prophetic words were written less than a decade after Williams made the decision to focus on the landscape as the primary subject of his work, they capture the spirit of his art, which created archetypal images that have since become part of our collective visual memory, as well as the significant place that it now holds within the great tradition of landscape painting in Australia.
Upon returning to Australia in late 1956 after five years in London, Williams saw the landscape of his own country anew. The vast featureless spaces, undistinguished scrubby bush and harsh light of his homeland offered a distinct contrast to the picturesque English countryside with which he had become familiar. The Australian landscape presented Williams with a subject that was ripe for new interpretation and, importantly, that also provided him with a structure on which he could base the formal and technical development of his art.
Before this momentous realisation, Williams was primarily a figurative painter and Cricketer, 1955, painted during his final year in London, is indicative of his approach. Rather than producing a realistic portrait, he built up the image through the application of thick daubs of coloured paint. This interest in the formal and technical aspects of painting, often above and beyond the subject matter, would remain a characteristic feature of Williams’s practice.
Kirsty M. Grant
Another important element of Williams’s working method was his habit of repeating a particular subject in various media, the lessons of texture, tone, colour and composition learnt in one influencing and extending his work in another. Echuca landscape, 1962, for example, emerged from Williams’s work on the etching, Sherbrooke Forest number 1, the rich mottled texture of the painting in part reflecting the pattern of aquatint realised in the etching.1 This painting and other related works continued Williams’s exploration of the sapling forest as subject matter; however, they are distinguished from the earlier, dark winter views by their colour, which is evocative of the dry, inland bush that Williams experienced in Echuca in the late 1950s.
1 J. Mollison, A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Canberra, 1989, p. 66.
Kirsty M. Grant
In Dark hillside, 1967, Williams’s calligraphic rendition of trees on the edge of the hill as a sequence of dots and dashes is highlighted against a luminous blue-green sky. The dramatic curve of the hillside is counterbalanced against the verticals of the trees and horizontals of fallen trunks, while the flattened pictorial space of the painting, a distinctive feature of the artist’s work originally borrowed from Cézanne, offers the possibility of several viewpoints.
Kirsty M. Grant
This distortion of perspective is also evident in the Werribee Gorge series, produced between late 1975 and 1978. Incorporating the ‘crowded, brilliant surfaces’ of the Kew Billabong series and the ‘heroic dimensions and panoramic sweep’ 1 of the Mount Kosciuszko and Guthega pictures which preceded them, paintings and gouaches, including Werribee Gorge, 1978, are significantly more complex in their spatial construction, colour and patterning than earlier work and reflect the confidence of a mature artist who has found his voice.
1 P. McCaughey, Fred Williams, Sydney, 1980, p. 290.
Kirsty M. Grant