Artist inspiration and artist influences. No biographies, dates or scholarly research here - this is a personal response to the work of Fred Williams by Australian artist Fiona Morgan.
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| Iron Ore Hill Mount Turner |
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| Hillside |
There are some hills just outside Bacchus Marsh as I drive to Melbourne from Ballan that look like the quintessential Fred Williams landscape. High horizon, sparse squiggly-dot trees, textured, muted tones. I love driving past it. It's like seeing the essence of what he achieved in his painting reflected back on a grand scale in life. A giant living version of how he saw the views.
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| Iron Ore Landscape |
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| Red Landscape |
‘In Australia there is no focal point. Obviously it was too good a thing for me to pass up.’ Rather than adopting conventional perspective, space is flattened and tilted towards the viewer, implying the microcosm within the macrocosm and an aerial viewpoint. From his retrospective at the
NGA.
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| Upwey Landscape |
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| Burning Tree Stump |
His interest in finding an aesthetic 'language' with which to express the very un-European Australian landscape. This was grounded in establishing a pictorial equivalent to the overwhelmingly vast, primarily flat landscape, in which the traditional European relationship of foreground to background breaks down, necessitating a complete re-imagining of compositional space. In this, Williams looked to the approach taken by Australian Aboriginal artists.
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| You Yangs Landscape |
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| Dry Creek Bed Werribee Gorge I |
He managed to achieve the completely new way of representing the landscape (no small accomplishment) that he aimed for and his paintings are instantly recognisable from across a room because of it.
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| Circle Landscape Upwey |
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| Claypans |
The influence of Aboriginal art is always apparent in the dots and pattern, the earthy muted tones, the aerial like view.
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| Silver And Grey |
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| Yellow Landscape |
His artwork has a texture and life that is breathtaking in real life. These small reproductions do his paintings no justice whatsoever. Even his abstracted versions of landscapes capture a distinct feeling of what it's like to stand in a vast Australian landscape and feel the spaciousness.
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| Hardy River Mount Turner Syncline |
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| Upwey Landscape II |
More links to Fred Williams
About the Creative Cauldron series of posts
The Creative Cauldron series of posts explores and showcases the visual styles, techniques, attitudes, ideas, artists and paintings that have had the most impact on me.
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