Deutscher and Hackett

The late 1970s was an intensely productive period for Fred Williams. He travelled internationally and held a series of solo exhibitions and in 1975 was the first Australian artist to be honoured with an invitation to present a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibition of gouaches opened in March 1977, acknowledging the significance of his art and its unique vision of the landscape within a national context, both to audiences who were familiar with the country his images described, and beyond. Introducing the exhibition, the Director of MoMA’s Department of Drawings, William S. Lieberman, wrote: ‘Fred Williams knows Australia. He is not an artist who would disdain a gum tree. He is not a foreigner seeking to impose a natural paradise on some strange, exotic land. He is, however, a romantic artist and his approach to landscape is narrative. His images may at first seem abstract, but they in fact describe actual times and places… Fred Williams’s colours are those of the continent itself… Fred Williams’s vision is authentic.’¹

Following the celebrated series of Werribee Gorge paintings, he began another series focussing on waterfalls. As he later recalled, ‘My enthusiasm was fired by the [Eugene] von Guérard Waterfall at Strath Creek in the Sydney Gallery. It was a picture I’ve always admired, and I made a free copy of it about fifteen years ago and had forgotten about it and put it aside… One day I woke up and thought, well actually I wouldn’t mind going around and looking at more of them.’² With this and other nineteenth-century paintings as inspiration, as well as the 1940s publication, Physiography of Victoria as a guide, Williams visited eleven waterfalls across southern Victoria during February and March 1979.

Williams didn’t drive, so painting trips were often made in the company of artist friends. After visiting Strath Creek Falls at the start of February with fellow artist Andrew Sibley, he wrote in his diary: ‘After several abortive efforts we get there (It’s not easy to find – [Despite the frontal viewpoint of] the von Guérard painting it is only accessible from the top – absolutely splendid… It is all very superb to paint… The landscape was quite brilliant around the falls & I will certainly go back there.’³ Still absorbed by the possibilities of the subject, the next day, he wrote: ‘I keep thinking of the ‘Strath Falls’ & will attempt a series of (large) pictures of it.’⁴

It would appear, however, that the idea of waterfalls as a subject had been in his mind for several years. In 1977, he made a small group of paintings of the Lal Lal Falls and the following year, he visited Geelong with Fraser Fair planning to paint a waterfall on the Barwon River. When the pair arrived however, they discovered that the river was in flood, and this painting is one of the works that Williams made in response to the unexpected scene with which he was presented. His process during these years was to make oil sketches on the spot – the canvases were small, approximately one metre square, so that they could be easily transported – recording the essential elements of the landscape, its structure and geography, as well as the colours and qualities of the light. Some of these paintings were reworked later and used as the basis for large-scale studio works. James Mollison writes that in these paintings on finely textured American canvas Williams used pre-Second World War Winsor and Newton paints (bought from Alan Moore, who had been an official war artist).⁵

The dynamism and visual complexity of the scene described in Barwon in flood II, 1978, are echoed in the energy of the paint work which conjures up something of the creative energy involved in its making, as well as the artist’s command of painterly gesture. Using a diversity of brushstrokes – from the characteristic dots and daubs that describe the distant vegetation, to the lively dancing lines that represent the movement of the fast-flowing water – Williams captures both the appearance of the landscape and the feeling of being there. The palette is similarly rich, the luminous colours of the flat terrain beyond the river and the cool pale glow of the sky providing a dramatic contrast to the muddy browns and white highlights of the flooded river. The scene also includes three towering chimneys in the upper right, pointing to the nearby presence of industry and reminding us that this is very much a twentieth-century landscape.

1. Lieberman, W. S., Fred Williams – Landscapes of a Continent, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1977, unpaginated
2. Fred Williams, cited in Mollison, J., A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p. 220
3. Fred Williams Diary, 1 February 1979, cited in Mollison, ibid., p. 223
4. Fred Williams Diary, 2 February 1979, cited in Mollison, ibid.
5. See Mollison, ibid., pp. 220 & 224

KIRSTY GRANT