Fred Williams, The Artist That Transcends Time

Fed Williams, Born in Richmond, Victoria, Australia, Frederick Ronald Williams was the son of an electrical engineer and a housewife.

Fred, wanted to be an artist early in his life. However, his father, a practical man, hoped he would be an architect.

Fred left school at age 14 and became an apprentice to a Melbourne shopfitters & box maker.

In 1943 Fred started studying at the National Gallery School, initially part-time until 1945 when he studied full time and also had private classes with George Bell in the 1940s.

Finishing his studies in 1947 at the National Gallery School, Fred held an exhibition with his friends as a student at the respected Stanley Coe Gallery in 1951.

Moving to London, Fred studied part-time at the Chelsea School Of Art from 1951 to 1956 and did an etching course at the Central School Of Arts & Crafts in 1954.

Living at the time in a South Kensington bedsit, he paid for his art practice through a part-time job at Savages’s picture framers.

While in London, Fred realised his interest in French post-impressionism and Cézanne in particular. His study of Cézanne helping him with his formal aspects, continuing to be influential throughout his career.

While in London, Fred produced vivid caricatured sketches of contemporary London life while learning etching and printing, establishing his method of reworking the same design many times, both in several mediums and often over several years.

Due to his asthma, Fred returned to Melbourne in 1956 through a cheap ticket purchased by his parents aboard a ship bringing visitors to the Melbourne Olympics.

Moving away from figures in his early paintings, he began painting landscapes after returning to Melbourne in 1956, remaining a significant theme in his art.

Fred, who was more concerned with the form of a painting, was at odds with his fellow artist such as John Brack, Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman.

These artists painted subjectivity and were the authors of the “Antipodean” manifesto of 1959,

Fred’s work, excluded from the Antipodean’s major exhibition.

The Antipodean’s, more focused on the spontaneous, improvised approach to painting, condemned the “new” art emerging from Europe, which was an increasing influence on Fred’s work.

Fred seeing the aesthetic potential of the Australian Bush in its built-in plasticity, was interested in finding the aesthetic language to express the unique Australian landscape.

In turn, Fred looked towards the Australian Aboriginal artists, as the Australian bush was primarily a flat landscape and where the traditional European painting of foreground and background breaks down.

Fred achieved this by tilting the landscape up against the picture plane. Frequently the only indication of the horizon was a horizon line or clumps of trees huddling closer together, some of Fred’s paintings had no horizon at all as in the You Yang’s Series.

Painting the bush near Mittagong, where he stayed with Friends, Fred painted the Nattai River painting there, the first painting to enter a public collection.

Fred, meeting his wife Lyn Watson in 1960 while painting at Sherbrooke, moved to a flat in South Yarra and maintained a small studio in Exhibition Street.

And in that same year was invited to enter the most prestigious and richest art prize at the time, the Helena Rubenstein Travelling Art Scholarship, Fred, winning the prize in 1963, proving to be a turning point in his career, bringing wide acclaim by curators and critics.

Fred also visited the You Yangs in the winter of 1962, painting a series of watercolour paintings in situ.

Because of a Sydney art dealer, Rudy Komon, taking Fred on as one of his key artists, Fred was able paint full time and quit his part-time job at a Melbourne picture framer, having his first commercially successful sell-out exhibition in 1967.

And in 1969, Moving to Hawthorn, Fred started using horizontal strip formats to capture different aspects of a landscape in the same painting.

In 1970 Fred created four large gouache-on-paper paintings called the West Gate Bridge series in strip formats, but after the collapse of part of the bridge under construction, Fred “lost heart in the project”, he also experimented with secondary colours during this time as colour television raised new colour expectations.

Continuing with his strip artworks, he created his Queenscliff I-IV series from 1971. Each strip represents a different time, painted with shifts in colour and tone depending on the time of day & were painted from the top of a cliff overlooking the beach.

During this time, he had developed his technique significantly, moving to a horizontal format from a vertical format.

In 1974, Fed travelled to Erith Island in the Bass Strait with historians Stephen Murray-Smith and Ian Turner and fellow painter Clifton Pugh.

Due to poor weather, Fred & his friends were unable to leave the island when they intended.

When the weather did break, Fred painted several gouaches employing the horizontal strip format, such as his “Beachscape, Erith Island I”, a beautiful set of paintings of the island coastline.

Image source Wikipedia.

Fred flew to Paris & Bologna with his wife in 1976, flying over the Northern Territory where he saw lines of bushfires burning.

An inspiration for his later series of artwork’s “Bushfires In Northern Territory”, also in this year Fred was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

In 1977, Fred held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first Australian artist to do so. On his return home, he travelled to Cape York, flying in a light aircraft low in the landscape, which he always wanted to do & was not disappointed.

In 1979 Fred visited the Lal Lal Falls on the Moorabool River near Ballarat Victoria, painting four panels designed to be seen as one, depicting the changes of light on the waterfall & surrounding landscape titled Lal Lal Polyptych.

Fred painted the last of his large landscapes Waterfall polyptych based on his paintings from Lal Lal Polyptych, and In his later years of his career, Fred created more landscapes with strong themes, his last being the Pilbara series.

Fred was also awarded a Doctorate of Law (Honoris Causa) by Monash University in 1980, and late in 1981, Fred was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, dying less than six months later.

Although his career was cut short, Fred certainly made a significant impact on Australian art and is one of Australia’s most expensive artists.

In my eyes, his Beachscape painting is a perfect example of his brilliance, and why he is so revered today in the art community, the different colours and perspectives used to capture the landscape at different times giving you the whole picture of a landscape without being there.

The use of the landscape and color in his paintings was bold when they were created, and is just as unique now.

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