Deutscher and Hackett

‘...To see one of Robinson's landscapes is to be in it as well, to walk, and maybe to forage, with the painter through gum-thicketed gullies where any difference between the sky and its reflection is hard to tell – and probably unnecessary to know. The viewer is required to take a leap of faith, and execute something akin to a cartwheel, before penetrating Robinson’s dizzy realms. The resulting experience is partly aesthetic, partly athletic...’¹
 
With its multiple viewpoints and sweeping panorama of darkness and light, earth and air, To Beechmont with storm clouds building, 2002 offers a magnificent example of the highly original landscapes for which William Robinson became so widely acclaimed and admired. Departing from predecessors such as Streeton, Drysdale and Williams who focused their attention on either inland or urban landscapes, Robinson was unique in his devotion to an environment hitherto neglected by artists – the ancient, labyrinthine rainforests of his immediate surroundings in the coastal hinterland of southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. Similarly, where the Australian landscape tradition had been characterised by a strong horizontality, Robinson deliberately eschewed established figure-ground relationships and conventional one-point perspective to transform landscape into a multi-view experience – allowing every fold and fissure to be explored yet still preserving a sense of panoramic continuity.
 
Immortalising those elements of nature which seem eternal – from the stormy clouds, mysterious in their gauzy substance to the endless forest, teeming with life – the present work powerfully encapsulates the artist’s enduring interest in the relationship between man and the cosmos. In stark contrast to his earlier bucolic farmyard scenes and landscapes which featured the genial folk figures of Bill and his wife Shirley, here the viewer is confronted with a dark, sombre wilderness which, within the context of the artist’s oeuvre, may well be construed metaphorically as a sign of mankind’s spiritual abandonment. Yet throughout his life Robinson steadfastly asserted the contrary – that God is in fact closest to his subject in desolation and moreover, that the artist reveals himself through his pictorial absence. Thus, for Robinson, ‘finding himself’ as a painter, appreciating the landscape and becoming closer to God were all inextricably linked. Indeed, describing the experience of walking through the forest of 2000 year old beech trees near his property at Springbrook (which he famously captured in the highly acclaimed five-panel masterpiece Creation Landscape – Darkness and Light I – V, 1988, Art Gallery of Western Australia), the artist poignantly evoked his visit to one of the world’s greatest pilgrimage destinations: ‘I wanted to show the presence of God somehow, not only through the mystery of walking through Chartres Cathedral and walking through this forest, but also something about the nature of providence.’²
 
Transcending descriptive landscape for more universal and metaphysical concerns, To Beechmont with storm clouds building celebrates the sheer wonder of creation itself with a panorama that is as grotesque as it is beautiful, as terrifying as it is marvellous – a place in which nature, memory and faith coalesce to offer one of the artist’s most profound meditations on the sacredness of the natural world. Capturing the silent, enduring power of this ancient landscape, Robinson seeks to convey not merely what he observes, but what he perceives within himself in his lifelong quest for meaning and spiritual truth. Like Wordsworth’s ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, for Robinson painting is ultimately an act of contemplating ‘things felt or remembered’; as Hannah Fink astutely observes, ‘...wholeness resides in the experience of the landscape itself – as such, his paintings may be considered both compelling approximations of, and poetic tributes to, that sacred moment in which the physical and spiritual become synonymous.’³ Indeed, it is precisely this rare fusion of observation and contemplation, of physical reality and spiritual revelation, that distinguishes To Beechmont with storm clouds building as one of Robinson’s most compelling achievements.

1. James, B., ‘A Landscape We Thought We Knew’, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 29 January 2003, p. 15
2. William Robinson, cited in Fink, H., ‘Light Years: William Robinson and the Creation Story’, Artlink, 2001, vol. 21, no. 4 at: www.artlink.com.au/articles/2555/light-years-william-robinson-andthe-cre...
3. Fink, ibid.
 
VERONICA ANGELATOS