Fred Williams

The Estate of Fred Williams (LW1045)

Fred Williams - 1974, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2 December 2017 - 11 February, 2018

Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams - 1927-1982, Bay Books, Sydney and London, all editions, p 258, plate 154 (and 155 for detail) and on dust jacket (of the 1987 edition).

This note relates to both the Williams and Shannon landscape paintings (cat. nos. 2 & 18)

“I only use the subject matter as an excuse to hang the picture on.” (1)

This statement goes a long way to explaining the gulf between these two paintings by two Melbourne artists – close contemporaries, both students of the Gallery School at the NGV and George Bell studio – who chose the same subject yet produced such radically different results.

On his regular visits between his home in Melbourne and his weekender near Heathcote, Shannon kept one eye on the road and the other on the lookout for new subjects: these included the spacious landscapes of central Victoria for which he is best known, but also the challenge of the less picturesque.  Quarries – Axedale and Lilydale specifically – hardly qualify as beautiful but he seems to have taken them on rather as he had previously the railway gantries on the city fringe. Both were depicted with cool dispassion – neither glorifying nor denigrating their stark industrial utility.  Similarly, with the quarries: hacked out of hillsides now bereft of trees and life, they rise like soulless walls in front of the viewer.  This work, unlike the starker examples where the rockface occupies most of the picture, allows the eye to roam from a human construct to a natural landscape, yet still made with the subject as central in itself. 

Williams, by contrast, seems less interested in the quarry as an autonomous feature in the landscape, as in how he can use those horizontal striations to structure his painting – in particular, the way they can offer a foil to the nearly parallel blue line of the train but also as a stark contrast to the "empty" sky above and the relatively "empty" landscape in the foreground.

If the results differ it may be that Shannon’s path was to spot a promising feature and then paint it - landscape first and painting second.  Williams seems to work the other way round: he has, in advance, a structure in the back of his mind and then sets out to find a landscape to fit it.  Painting first, and subject second.  However, it may equally be argued that all artists do this all the time.  If they didn't have the "picture" in advance, how would they recognise the subject.

(1) Williams’ diary entry, 5 July, 1970, quoted in Patrick McCaughey, op cit. p 352