FRED WILLIAMS

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above circa 1973

This work has not been lined and is framed in a modern gold timber frame. No visible defects or retouchings, confirmed by UV inspection.
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In mid-February 1968 there were severe bushfires in the Dandenong Ranges.  Burning over several days, they came within a hundred metres of Fred Williams' Upwey home.  The artist recorded in his diary: 'it was really hair-raising... like being in mid[st] of a war.'¹  Once the danger was past, however, Williams immediately and energetically began to tackle the representation of the fire-ravaged landscape and its orange-green recovery.  Over the next few weeks he made a hundred gouaches, and an extensive series of studio oils followed: burnt landscapes of bitumen black and ash white, surreal visions of chimney-smoking trees and the curly regeneration of ferns. 

This imagery continued to interest the artist, even after he had moved down from the hills to Hawthorn, and after his artistic reorientation to more minimal treatment, to the spare, spotty, masking tape-zipped and horizonless paintings of the Australian Landscape series.  In February 1969, when Craig McGregor sought to represent Williams at work for his book In the making, the artist took him to the You Yangs, which had been devastated by the Lara fires just the month before. In his pen-portrait, McGregor describes this set-piece excursion, with Williams '... toiling up the You Yangs ... where he does much of his painting.  He wears climbing boots, well-pressed pants and a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned at the wrist; nothing could look more incongruous but he covers the ground with practised speed, muttering as he goes: "That's lovely.  Look at that salmon coloured earth..."'² 

Along with David Moore's photographs of the artist in the field, the book reproduces a dark and thickly-clotted gouache captioned 'Sketch painted on location at the You Yangs'.3 One of two finished sketches Williams completed on that day, this work is the preliminary study or inspiration for the present painting. The two pictures have exactly the same geo-formal bones, the same hillside falling away from middle right to lower left; and it has the same tree-poxed skin, the 'tonal base which allow[s] the impastos to have their full expression, in delicious creams and blacks.'3  An echo or reprise of the Dandenong bushfire oils of the previous year, Burnt Landscape, You Yangs shows us Williams at work on his great project: describing a particular, favourite location in a particular, seasonal (post-bushfire) mode, yet through that specificity creating a landscape of striking archetypal-national resonance. 

1. Fred Williams, diary, 20 February 1968, quoted in James Mollison, A singular vision: the art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, pp. 124 - 5
2. Craig McGregor (ed.) In the Making, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1969, p. 107
3. Interestingly, the gouache is reproduced adjacent to an image of what McGregor calls the "Completed Studio Version.' The latter, while sharing the underlying geological/formal structure of the study is, however, only obliquely related. Abbreviated, light and airy, it is less an observed Bushfire than one of the studio-synthesised Australian Landscapes.
4. John Olsen, Drawn from Life, Duffy and Snelgrove, Sydney, 1997, p. 163 (diary entry for 17 December 1981)