Queensland Art Gallery Presscuttings Book 10 : Record of press coverage, March 1982 - May 1984

,·· _,. 16 Ap ril 19 84 Testimony to a genius ••• THE PILBARA SERIES Art Review (1979-1981 ) climaxes the ca- reer of that great artist Fred Art Gallery. And what a treat it Williams, whose career was is.One could single out some of cut short by his untimely the paintings as especially death. · .: beautiful or exciting; but it is delicious little stabs and marb one savors so much i/1 his .iii}~ ings. " ; ;' · '' It is all there iuJ:-.~P.1/. Strits. The colon! or . ' . Fred Williams visited tbc-Pil- rather the cumulative effect of hara region of Western Aus!ra-, rthe manr variati?ns on .the lia where the Hamcrsley Mines theme which works Its magic. arc situated, on the invit'atir11 of Should one ever visit the re– Sir Roderick Carnegie, chair- gion it would be impossible not man of CRA. to sec it through Williams' eyes. 'The first visit was followed Of course, .this i_s w~a.t he has soon i,y a second one. Williams ah~·ays achieved •~ his interpre: mad, many photographs and t~t1ons of Australian landsca~. man gouachcs from the air g_iven us a completely _new v1- scene, of course, an;'a.:pa .' ·. , delight. .Williams charged his bruih with the most fiery col,:. ors, from orange-red to crushed mulberry shades. And where he docs not eliminate the sky 1 hc:· had to solve the problem of the hot field opposing the pale, cool sky. y d H" · · s1on. , and on the groun . 1s 1mag!• w·ii· d ~ · _ nation was fired by the expcn- . . 1 aa_ms ocs .-~.~n ,.. of this fantastic red land- t1c1se. Has works ue.t. tJJt,rb en.... blend of fresh observation and scape. . . contemporary picture-making. . The gouachc paintings we_re His genius could absorb it all followed'11p late~ with larg~ oils and make it his own. •on canvas, done an the studio. His genius was that he dis- Tht Pi/hara Suits forms covered in the vast spaces, with part of the CRA art collection their scattered gums and sparse : .1.tl ~s been assembled for a features, the possibilities of · lr it~'!f =c•hibition which is t,ranslating them in terms of ;>' ~ ~cw at the Queensland colorfields, articulated by those In the arrangement of the main masses, land and sky, he used a variety of devices he had used before; two horizontal zones divided by a high horizori line, which 1s sometimes straight and sometimes slightly curved; a diagonal division re– sulting from the triangle of a hillside, lopped off by the edge of the picture; a terrain seen on plan from above - but never assuming a fixed viewpoint. The color is radiant, the sense of nuance ex4uisite in both the oils and the gouachcs. For the gouaches, Williams often used the long strip format he had used before for his gouachcs of the coastline. Oth-' ·ers have; ~omJ>!lrcd the use of• this format with the renditions of the early 19th Century topo– graphical artists. My first reac;tion Was to think of th05C mltlvtllOus Chi– nese handsc(ol11~1r:dscapc unfolding in time · .: pace. Williams suggests adm1 bl,Y in his strip gouachca, the seer~ung~ ly infinite stretches of the out– back where all human scale is lost, by scaling down the indi– vidual landscape features and by emphasising long, far-reach– ing, brush-drawn contour lines. The exhibition will continue until May 20. -DrGERTRUDELANGER . •·