FRED WILLIAMS

David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney in 1965
Collection of Ann Lewis, Sydney; purchased from the above.

W. D. & H. O. Wills Prize, David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, 4 - 14 August 1965

Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927-1982 (rev. ed.), Bay Books, Kensington, 1987, pp. 182-3, pl. 92, illus.

Original black timber bevel fronted frame built by the artist in 1965. Very fine cracking in heavier impasto areas ie. the trees protruding into the sky. UV inspection reveals two fluoresce marks both to the lower right hand corner; one 5mm in length, the other to the far lower right 1.5cm in length.
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The mid 1960s was a particularly productive and successful period for Fred Williams. From 1965 the regular stipend he received from Rudy Komon allowed him to paint full-time, and he worked steadily through a succession of themes derived from landscapes in the You Yangs, Upwey and Lysterfield. In 1964 he won the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship, and in 1965 he was represented overseas in two exhibitions: Young Australian Painters which toured Japan and the International Exhibition of Printmaking in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia. That same year the National Gallery of Victoria bought two paintings for its permanent collection.

Hillside I and its mirror-image companion Hillside II have been described by Patrick McCaughey as 'the finest products' of the 1965-67 sequence McCaughey called the 'Hillside and Hummock in the Landscape paintings.' McCaughey also records that 'Williams attached particular significance to them', noting that the images also exist both as etchings and as detailed gouaches.² The artist evidently considered the present work to be sufficiently important to have entered it in the 1965 Wills Art Prize. 

In Hillside I  the dotscapes of the You Yangs paintings of 1963 and the denser blotscapes of 1964's Upwey pictures are combined and further complicated by a dramatic play with the horizon. 1965 was the year the artist painted and etched his first circular and oval landscapes, and the motif of the steeply-angled hillside is not unrelated, in its spinning, dizzy weightlessness. The precipitousness of the hillside, and the fact that we cannot see either summit or base, subverts the conventional anchoring-descriptive function of the horizon line. The severity of the tilt changes it into a purely abstract mechanism, a device for creating spatial and formal tension between the tree-poxed slab of russet earth and the blank, pink, cloud-smeared sky. Indeed, the 'horizon' is so close to the vertical as to recall Williams's Barnett Newman-like 'zips' in both earlier and later work: the Sherbrooke and Sapling paintings of 1962, or the Australian Landscapes of 1969-70. What stops the work from plunging into formless vertigo are the spirit level lines of saplings and fallen logs, which provide the painting with a stable scaffolding of right angles, a 'visual texture' analogous to that of analytical cubism. 

As Ian Burn once observed, 'Williams's pictures organise our seeing differently.' ³ That this painting, with its crazy, near-vertical horizon should appear such a perfectly natural, even typical image of the Australian landscape is testament to the artist's ability to focus our attention more on pictorial weight than on mere terrestrial gravity.

1. Sun-Herald, Sydney, 23 October 1966, p. 101
2. McCaughey, P., Fred Williams 1927-1982 (rev. ed.), Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1987, p. 182. The etching related to the present work is Hillside No. 1, 1965-66 (JM224)
3. Burn, I., 'That is how a landscape should be, even if it isn't', Art Monthly, 8 March 1988, p. 2