Fred Williams

Rudy Komon Art Gallery, Sydney
Geoff K. Gray Auctions, Sydney, 15 September 1986, lot 103
Mr Basil Sellers AM, Sydney; purchased from the above

Important paintings from our collection, Rudy Komon Art Gallery, Sydney, May 1972, cat. 139

There are no visible defects. This work has not been lined and has the original stretcher and is in good original condition. UV inspection confirms there has been no retouching or restoration.
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For Fred Williams, the late 1960s was a period of tremendous invention and productivity. In this period we see him resolutely pursuing abstract essences in the Australian landscape, whether in the familiar territory of outer-Melbourne Upwey and Lysterfield, down the coast at Mornington, or up in the desert at Tibooburra. His great achievement in the works of this period is that he manages to distil these varied visions into a coherent and consistent language of expressive mark-making without losing sight (literally) of the particularities of image and experience.

Such is certainly the case with the 'Bushfire' pictures of 1968-1969. In mid-February 1968 there were severe fires 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 preoccupy the artist, even after he and his family had moved down from the hills to East Hawthorn a year later. In the studio, emotion could be recollected in tranquillity and frightful scenes reconstituted as aesthetic structures.

Within the resulting 'Bushfire' series, Patrick McCaughey identifies four major groups of paintings, which together 'provide a comprehensive account of the event from the moment of destruction to the eventual regeneration of the forest:'²  McCaughey entitles the four sub-themes 'Fire Approaching', 'Burnt Landscape', 'Landscape with Burning Tree' and 'Fern Diptych'. Of the first, he writes:

'The first paintings take as subject the fire seen from Williams's own back garden. The column of smoke and the flash of the flames are vividly recalled. Although seen from a distance, the fire dwarfs and darkens the landscape with its eerie, smokey colour. Williams uses his old Upwey motif, a high horizon and a blocky geometry, for the landscape. But the monumentality of the Upwey paintings is shaken up. This is the fire coming towards the observer, the landscape is charged and dynamic. These were remarkable paintings to produce at all, constructed from memory as Williams relived what was a terrifying moment as the fire broke over the hill behind him and threatened his house. Fed by a north wind, unstoppable and immense, the fire is what the paintings recall; they are all the more impressive for their dispassionate, observed quality and minimal dramatization and theatricality.'³

Where earlier treatments of the 'fire approaching' theme⁴ presented verticals of tree trunks and smudges of foliage over a scrubby, agitated dark pink ground, in the present work the earth reflects the sky in a higher-key, smoother, almost metallic grey field. The picture's narrative and pictorial focus is the horizon, with its jostling crowd of distant bush-spots, it small, scarlet, flaming threat, and the curving blade of the fire front smoke rising above. Falling down from that central line, running from the fire towards the viewer, the landscape collapses into a broken mosaic of colour: fat, brackeny-bouldery curlicues of rose, copper, brown and yellow ochre; blue and white and grey tree stumps and twists of drifting, floating ash.

A powerful and resonant painting, Fire burning on the ridge is firmly part of Williams's 'Bushfire' explorations, yet also heralds the ensuing series of 1969-1970: both the spare emptiness of the 'Australian Landscapes' and the creamy tonalities of the 'Silver and Grey Landscapes'.

We are most grateful to Lyn Williams for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

1.  Fred Williams, diary, 20 February 1968, quoted in James Mollison, A singular vision: the art of Fred Williams, Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1989, pp. 124-125
2.  Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927-1982 (rev. ed.), Sydney: Bay Books, 1987, p. 200
3.  ibid., p. 202
4.  See, for example, Fire approaching, 1968, plate 108, ibid.