Fred Williams: Water
- 12 December 2004 - 27 February 2005
The theme of this exhibition is water
as a focus and a life force in an arid land.
Williams observed that unlike European landscapes that
naturally compose themselves into picturesque scenes, in
Australia ‘you have to invent your focal points’.
This he did with water - river banks, shorelines, forest
ponds and swamps, waterfalls, eroded creek beds and flowing
river gorges- in short, the visual distribution patterns
of water.
It is interesting to note, for example, that on Williams’s
return for England his first Australian landscape series
was based on and at the Nattai River, and later, the series
that established his early reputation, the ‘You Yang’
series, was developed around the idea that the water distribution
patterns. Thus valleys and water courses which dictate vegetation
patterns, can by extension, be decoded to give a topographical
reading of the landscape.
His famous strip gouaches were developed to accommodate
the water/river bank/land and sky horizon lines. He systematically
recorded the passage of the Yarra from its source to its
mouth, with a number of major series of works such as the
‘Forrest Pond’ series and the ‘Kew Swamp’
series punctuating the completion of the project. In his
last major series, the ‘Gorge’ series the falling
zig and zag linear course of the river is used to encode
the topography of his mountain gorges into his paintings.
The aquatic line also acts as an armature to encode a landscape
reading into Williams’s fields of textured paintwork,
and served as a device which carried him into a contemporary
aesthetics which characterised his maturity.
