WILLIAM ROBINSON

Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in November 1987

Lynn Fern, William Robinson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p 110, pl. 24

Good condition.
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William Robinson made a quite sudden appearance on the national art stage in 1987 with his Archibald Prize winning Equestrian self-portrait. The instant celebrity of the Archibald win and the subsequent success of the grand, rotating, vertiginous Beechmont landscapes have tended to obscure the artist's earlier career: to that point some thirty years of art teaching and twenty years of solo exhibitions. His first maturing was with complex, richly-coloured interiors with figures, very much in the manner of the European Nabis - Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard - but with an attractive narrative wit.

In the early 1970s the artist and his family moved from inner city Brisbane to a small farm at Birkdale. 'We knew nothing about animals at all...Bruce Dawe wrote a poem about a mini-farmer riding a mini-mower around all the time - well, that's how it starts. It starts that way. It finishes with seventy goats and forty chooks and five or six cows and sheds all over the place fifteen years later.'¹ Inevitably, images of this world, of the farmyard and livestock, began to appear in Robinson's work. In 1978 he exhibited the first of his chook paintings and two years later an entire show of cows. As artist and farmer, Robinson's attitude to the beasts was ambivalent: 'It was some strange change to be exhibiting cows...it had to be done to get where I am now, even though it had no relationship to where I am now. It was like an electric shock. I had to break out of all that art, all that Bonnard that had gone on before. And suddenly, there I was with these... paintings of cows on a large scale: very confronting...' ²

The present work is from that 1980 series of cow paintings, in which he 'used images of cows to explore compositional devices and some of the possibilities of the picture plane.'³ It certainly retains strong resonances of the Nabis. There is an oriental vertical perspective in the work's decorative scatterings of goats and fowls, of red, white and black, and a similar japonisme in the radical croppings - the cow on the left hand edge, for example. Despite the amiable, even goofy quality of the subject, what is most impressive in this painting is the refined taste with which the artist assembles the component cattle, goats and chickens, grass and thistles, cunningly balancing tone and colour, experience and imagination.

1. William Robinson interviewed by Lou Klepac, in Lou Klepac (ed.), William Robinson: paintings 1987-2000, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 33
2. ibid.
3. Lynn Fern, William Robinson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 40