FRED WILLIAMS

Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney
Art Gallery Schubert, Queensland; purchased from the above
Private collection, Sydney
Private collection, New South Wales

Waterfall Paintings, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, September - October 1996, cat. 7

This work has not been examined under ultraviolet light, but appears to be in good overall condition.
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The Waterfall series of 1979-80 has been described as 'one of Williams's most attractive and poetic groups of paintings', though not having been exhibited or published as an historically, conceptually or pictorially unified group, it 'remains one of the... least-known aspects of his late work.' ¹

The Waterfall pictures were in fact something of a slow burn, the idea taking almost a year to come to fruition. Describing the origins of the idea in a Film Australia interview, Williams stated that: 'My enthusiasm was fired by the von Guérard Waterfall at Strath Creek in the Sydney Gallery. It was a picture I've always admired, and I made a free copy of it... and had forgotten about it and put it aside... One day I woke up and thought, well actually I wouldn't mind going around and looking at more of them.'²

So when, following the disruptions of a heavy exhibition schedule in 1977-78, the artist returned to landscape fieldwork in early 1979, it was waterfalls that determined his itinerary. Armed with E. She rbon Hills's geology text Physiography of Victoria, Williams made excursions to no fewer than eleven different waterfalls across the State, from the Western District to East Gippsland. In the Werribee Gorge and Dry Creek Bed pictures of 1976-77, Williams had extended his interest in the perspectiveless aerial view of landscape, in the dynamic shift from the floor (the geological-horizontal ground plane) to the wall (the pictorial-vertical picture plane).  In these new works he explored a similar paradox in the form of the waterfall, that section of a river that runs vertically instead of horizontally, that flows down rather than along. Given this concern for antipodean inversion, it is not surprising to find the artist writing in a diary entry of April 1979: 'Work on the "falls" pictures - upside-down is my usual routine... The series is going fairly well - actually I like it because there is no beginning or end?'³

The subject of the present work is Mason's Falls, a forty-five metre stepped drop of sedimentary rock which cuts through the bush below Mt Sugarloaf in the Kinglake National Park. Within the frame of abstracted bushscape, with its dappled, scrubby, blue-brown all-overness, the dark-wet siltstone of the falls rears up like a jagged, shadowy totem. Something which is an integral element of the landscape, a part of the view, is nevertheless somehow detached, standing out from it as an independent motif, in much the same way as does the well-known Stump II (1976,Private collection).

This ambiguous push-pull of figure and ground in Mason's Falls would appear to owe something to oriental painting, with its random cut-offs and insistent verticality, and probably also to the late Cézanne, whose Bibémus Quarry pictures create a similar tension between the organic logic of trees and the crazy geometries of broken stone. ⁴ Whatever the inspiration, it is (as Patrick McCaughey said of another work in the series) 'the profoundly contradictory quality held in the... heart of the work that makes it so deeply stirring and disturbing. The waterfall is both a deep, cavernous recession, a world of ultimate retreat and, at the same time, pulses and pushes out towards the viewer. It is a landscape of revelation in which the sense of another world being uncovered for us is paramount. 'Distance and immediacy, the smooth and the rough, water and stone, shadow and substance, the monumental and the lyrical - these great contradictions that shaped Williams's expressive life through the 1970s join here on a new more profound level of experience and consciousness.'⁵

1. Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927-1982 (rev. ed.), Bay Books, Kensington, 1987, p. 304
2. Quoted in James Mollison, A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989, p. 220
3. Quoted ibid., p. 224
4. Williams saw a number of these works not long before commencing the Waterfall series, in the exhibition Cézanne: The Late Works, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 October 1977 - 3 January 1978
5. McCaughey, op. cit., p. 303