Deutscher and Hackett

While many Australian landscape painters looked towards Australia’s arid interior for inspiration, Bill Robinson embraced the south-eastern Queensland mountain ranges with their rainforests and soaring features. Combined with his radical treatment of the horizon and distorted perspective, Robinson offered an entirely new approach to Australian landscape painting. Just as Fred Williams altered the way we see our landscape, so too did Robinson. Once one is familiar with his paintings, it is impossible to look skywards through trees and not think of his works.

In 1987, when Robinson painted Mount Tamborine on fire, Michael Gleeson-White was the Chairman of the Trustees at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and as such was involved in the selection and judging of the Archibald and Wynne Prizes. Around this time, a small group of collectors, recently left adrift by the death of art dealer Rudy Komon, seamlessly adopted the art dealer Ray Hughes who represented Robinson. These collectors included Peter Elliott, Ray Kidd and Colin Laverty. Like Gleeson-White, Elliott and Kidd had amassed extensive holdings of works by Fred Williams, and they knew their paintings well. In time, each became major Robinson collectors.

Elliott, Kidd and Laverty jostled for first choice whenever Robinson works arrived at Hughes’ Sydney gallery. However, Mount Tamborine on fire, the current example, went directly from the artist to the Art Gallery of New South Wales as Robinson’s 1987 Wynne Prize entry – thus bypassing the usual route through Ray’s Surry Hills gallery and so evading the eyes of Elliott, Kidd and Laverty, each of whom expected first choice on any new work.

During judging for the Wynne Prize, Gleeson-White immediately called Ray Hughes and reserved Mount Tamborine on fire for the Gallery’s permanent collection. The Director, Edmund Capon, in his mischievous manner dismissed Robinson as a sort of hokey naïve from the backwaters of Queensland and so the Gallery did not buy the work. But the Trustees, led by Gleeson-White, awarded Robinson the 1987 Archibald Prize, for his Equestrian self-portrait, 1987. And since the Gallery declined the option to buy Mount Tamborine on fire, Gleeson-White seized the opportunity and acquired the painting for his own collection – much to the chagrin of Elliott, Kidd and Laverty. By 1990, the Art Gallery of New South Wales finally recognised Robinson’s significance and purchased a similar landscape, Wispy landscape, 1990, thereby validating Gleeson-White’s initial instinct. Ironically, Wispy landscape features a cameo of the artist on horseback; Robinson can be seen rounding up cows in the top right area of the work and appears exactly as he did in his Archibald winner Equestrian self-portrait.

The dramatic features of the Granite Belt cliffs, meandering rivers and waterfalls offered the perfect subject for Robinson to flaunt his painterly innovations. Mount Tamborine on fire features many of these, most notably his distorted perspectives with the sky spanning from top to bottom of the work. His staccato application of paint, developed after many years of studying Pierre Bonnard, is most apparent around this period. The small flecks of complementary colour jostle and fizz on the surface, but step back and they combine to form the colour harmonies the artist sought to convey. The artist and his wife Shirley can be seen in the lower left of the work, where Shirley appears to be pointing to a flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos careering through the valley as the pair frolic in their Eden idyll.

Bill Robinson was a deeply spiritual man, and certain paintings may be viewed as his personal homage to the creator. He typically painted every day, all day – except Sundays. God rested on the Sabbath, and so did Robinson, reserving the day for reflection and music in humble observance of the Maker’s achievements. Like the Renaissance masters he so much admired, Robinson looked to the heavens for his inspiration.

HENRY MULHOLLAND