WILLIAM ROBINSON

Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney
Australian and International Paintings, Christie's, Melbourne, 25 November 2002, lot 59.
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

One of the great achievements in Australian art is in the painting of the landscape. It is as rich and changing as the varying motifs themselves - from settled fields to mountains of mists, barren deserts and tropical forests.

Generation after generation of Australian artists have been and reinvented the landscape for themselves and their fellows.  Perhaps none did it so brilliantly as Fred Williams, who not only changed the way we looked at our country from Upwey to the Pilbara, but also opened our eyes to the beauty that was once dismissed as the monotony of the Australian scene.  He was a true classicist in modern dress.  Look also at the endlessly creative treatment of a single location or special theme - the outback or the ever current drought.  Compare Hans Heysen's watercolour, Guardian of the Brachina Gorge, 1937 (National Gallery of Victoria) with Russell Drysdale oil, walls of China, Gol Gol, 1945 (Art Gallery of New South Wales); and then again Nolan's Central Australia series of 1949-50 and Olsen's Lake Eyre in flood.

William Robinson is a worthy and proud contributor to this achievement, totally individual and idiosyncratic in the best tradition, as seen in this accomplished work. Rules of the artificial one point perspective have been thrown to the wind - there must be at least three separate areas of sky, all unrelated, and the gorge and creek ascend to the picture plane, rather than recede into the landscape in the polite pictorial manner. The ghost white trunks of fallen trees appear like birds in flight, throwing out another challenge of inversion. These and other like manipulations, often humorous, are not merely metaphoric. Their wit catches the mind to give their meaning clout. Moreover, they oblige the viewer to re-see things and rediscover in the process the innate beauty that surrounds us, especially Robinson in his forest Paradise.