Deutscher and Hackett

In 1984, Bill Robinson and his wife Shirley relocated from their farm in the coastal locale of Birkdale to one of 80 hectares, surrounded by acres of bush, rainforest and cliffs at Beechmont, near Canungra in the ancient Darlington mountain ranges of Queensland. The long process of discovery of his new surroundings, primarily done on foot, immersively travelling across steep terrain, was drawn out over many years. It would provide the foundation for some of Robinson’s most inventive and transcendental depictions of the country, breaking with the expectations of traditional Australian landscape painting. Morning landscape with neighbour’s bull, 1991, was created shortly after Robinson had resigned from teaching to devote himself full-time to painting and living on the land.1 Featuring recurrent narrative motifs of cows reflected in bodies of water, and of the artist himself, here appearing up a tree, alone in his new Eden, Morning landscape with neighbour’s bull masterfully combines Robinson’s signature grandiose depiction of the landscape with a humorous vignette of country life.
 
The multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival nature of William Robinson’s paintings first arose as a formal solution for the depiction of the expansive and vertiginous terrain. But it was within the creation of an immersive effect that conveyed the artist’s profound investigations into the relationship between man and the cosmos that this technique found its full effect. Although resistant to attempts to connect his work with literary or art historical antecedents, Robinson’s efforts to depict the awe-inspiring scale and panoramic depths of a remote and primordial terrain inevitably invite comparison with early colonial explorer artists with their Humboldtian quest to visualise the ineffable unity of the natural world.2 The success of Robinson’s contemporary expression of this same impetus, his daring break with horizontality in landscape painting, was assured when The rainforest won the Wynne Prize in 1990. Buoyed by this recognition, Robinson’s landscape paintings over the following years acquired a Claudian atmospheric quality, inflected with a greater sense of spiritual grandeur.
 
Disorientingly appearing in the lower right-hand corner of the composition, the breaking dawn of the painting’s title scatters crepuscular rays across the landscape, illuminating the pale trunks of the eucalypt forest, which fan out from the centre of the painting. The contrast of an apricot yellow sky against the backlit sea of forested peaks as the sun rises, although used to great spiritual and psychological expression in the Mountain series of 1992, here simply provides a theatrical expression of the passing of time.
 
In the centre of the composition, perched in the tree (for how long has he been hiding?) is a small figure of Bill-the-farmer, with his recognisable hat and gumboots. A transitional Birkdale-at-Beechmont pastoral composition continuing the animal antics of Robinson’s earlier Farmyard paintings, Morning landscape with neighbour’s bull comically presents the neighbour’s borrowed bull, not as an aggressive creature, but one standing placidly in the stream, followed by a row of hopeful cows, romance yet to bloom.
 
Morning landscape with neighbour’s bull was purchased directly from Ray Hughes Gallery in 1991 by Dr Peter Laverty and Liz Laverty, esteemed collectors and patrons of William Robinson, in whose collection the painting has remained for over thirty years.
 
1. William Robinson: The Transfigured Landscape, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum and Piper Press, 2011, pp. 163 – 164
2. Seer, L., Darkness and Light: The art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, pp.18 -20
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH