WILLIAM ROBINSON

Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney (label on reverse)
The estate of the late Verity Lambert; purchased from the above

The Archibald Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 December 1983 - 13 January 1984, cat. 6

Lynne Fern, William Robinson, Craftsman House, Roseville East, 1995, p. 208 (illus.)

This work is presented in a gold painted timber frame. Surface dust has collected on the impasto areas. The work has not be lined and has the original stretcher. Overall excellent original condition.
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In a chapter of her 1995 monograph, Lynn Fern partly explains William Robinson's cow paintings by outlining a lineage of cows in art history, from the pastorals of Nicolaes Berchem, John Constable and Elioth Gruner to the bovine modernism of Jean Dubuffet, Andy Warhol and the contemporary Indian artist Manjit Bawa.¹ However, as the artist has noted, 'cows...only meant something to me when I kept them myself.'²

In the early 1970s Robinson and his family moved from inner city Brisbane to a hobby farm at Birkdale, and ended up 'with seventy goats and forty chooks and five or six cows and sheds all over the place fifteen years later.'³ Inevitably, images of this world, of the farmyard and livestock, began to appear in Robinson's work. In 1978 he exhibited the first of his poultry paintings and two years later an entire show of cows. As artist and farmer, Robinson's attitude to the beasts was ambivalent: 'It was some strange change to be exhibiting cows...it had to be done to get where I am now, even though it had no relationship to where I am now. It was like an electric shock...suddenly, there I was with these...paintings of cows on a large scale: very confronting...'⁴

The present work comes from late in the Birkdale period, just before Robinson and his family moved to the Beechmont rainforest. By this time, the cow had gone from being a novel motif to be carefully scrutinised and described, to an intensely familiar figure, readily available for expressive manipulation. William and Josephine is a deceptively simple painting, with compositional, chromatic and tonal weight held in delicate balance. A companionable equilibrium of cow and farmer is achieved through particular consonances between the two figures: their slightly-off vertical stances, their generous girths (Robinson's emphasised by the bulge and slit of an unbuttoned shirtfront), the pronounced white rims of their eyes, the rhyming triangles of his hat, collar and sleeves and her bony hips.

Between and around them is the ambiguous ground plane of the farmyard; a field of expressive emptiness the colour of hay and dust and dry grass and cowpats, enlivened by dappled shadow and flickering light. The blankness is described with the painterly brushwork of the neo-expressionist 1980s, a rich, thick mat of strokes that recalls a number of Australian painters, including Tony Tuckson, John Peart and fellow-Queenslander Davida Allen.

Robinson's first entry in the Archibald Prize (which he subsequently won twice – in 1987 and 1995), this work revels in paint while refusing to take it too seriously: Josephine's tail with its dark, fibrous end, looks for all the world like a dripping brush.

1. Lynn Fern, William Robinson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, pp. 40-41
2. William Robinson interviewed by Lou Klepac, in Lou Klepac (ed.), William Robinson: paintings 1987-2000, Beagle Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 33
3. ibid.
4. ibid.