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.

 

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.

 

‘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.

Wikipedia:

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.

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. 

 

The influence of Aboriginal art is always apparent in the dots and pattern, the earthy muted tones, the aerial like view.

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.

More links to Fred Williams

Fred Williams official website: http://www.fredwilliams.me.com.au/index.html

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. 

The rest of the series is accessible via the Creative Cauldron page. Have a meander if you please, and remember to check out my artworks on Flickr, and have an insider peek at life as an artist on Facebook.

Still on go-slow and recovery after the intensity of the art fair of last weekend. The veggie patch is looking mighty fine with the extra tinkering and pottering it's been receiving in my extra downtime. Loads of rain and sunshine has helped everything grow.

At least we are getting more than just grass.

It was an exhausting and successful weekend of art fair goodness, from which it has taken me three full days to recover. Bugger being an introvert - I can meet and greet and chat all day with people as well as anyone else, but when it's all over a recharge is not enough - I need a brand new battery!

Despite the tiringness, it was wonderful to meet so many people, to see people's reactions to the artwork and the cookbook concept (overwhelmingly postive) and to meet a bunch of likeminded local creatives.

Another roundup, including loads more photos of the event (and not written by me!) over at the Ballarat Independent: http://theballaratindependent.com.au/news/article/nanna-technology-and-artisan-craft-a-fine-mix 

"Ballarat's talented artists and artisans were once again a feature over the weekend at the second Ballarat Artisan Festival. A wonderfully diverse array of work was on show with contemporary and traditional artworks, shoemaking, glass works, sculpture, cartooning, textiles and several other crafts... "