Lot 31
  • 31

WILLIAM ROBINSON

Estimate
60,000 - 80,000 AUD
bidding is closed

Description

  • William Robinson
  • SEASCAPE WITH SURFBOARD
  • Signed and dated 96 lower right
  • Oil on canvas
  • 76.5 by 102cm

Provenance

Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney
The estate of the late Verity Lambert, London; purchased from the above in 1996

Exhibited

William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, 28 June - 24 July 1996, cat. 16 (illus.) 

Condition

This work is present in a timber box frame. There is a tiny fleck of paint loss lower centre edge. Overall good original condition.
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Catalogue Note

Just south of Tweed Heads, not far from William Robinson's property at Beechmont, lies the little coastal resort town of Kingscliff. The Robinsons began spending weekends at Kingscliff beach in the early 1990s, and eventually moved there in 1994. Over the previous decade, in response to the rainforest environment of the McPherson Ranges, Robinson had developed his mature, grandly eccentric 'landscape system'1; that floating, spinning, vertiginous topography of simultaneous multiple scales and viewpoints, of torn and pushed-around horizons, geological and vegetable spirals, liquid skies and dancing trees. In the seascapes of the mid-1990s, Robinson applies this perceptual-pictorial structure to the Kingscliff coast. For the artist, 'the fleeting sensation of luminous sea, wet sand and darkening dry sand...produced real possibilities...'2

The landscape elements are naturally fewer and simpler – sky and clouds, ocean and waves, sand and shells and, as here, the occasional surfboard – but the Kingscliff beachscapes convey the same sense of the picture as a narrative, an assemblage of separate visual impressions gathered while walking. Also consistent are the pictures' sensuous curvatures – the bulging circular-globular-planetary-fisheye distortions of earth and sea and sky – and their subtle colour harmonies – the cream and gold of the sand, the ultramarine and cadmium green ocean, the bright white and sunset rose of clouds and foam. Coming between the Beechmont landscapes of the early 1990s and the Springbrook subjects of 1996 onwards, the Kingscliff paintings represent an important 'summer holiday break', their momentary intake of maritime air and light introducing a softer refulgence and a greater tonal delicacy into the artist's vocabulary.  He himself describes how 'when walking at the seashore, I observed the moment to darkness.  For a short moment before this, a violet of the most ravishing beauty appeared at the line between dry and wet sand caused by a retreating wave.  This vision will always remain with me.'3

At the centre of the present work are the broken and crumbling sandcastles left at the end of each family beach day, 'like the remains of a civilisation...a vanished life.'4  These sawtooth or shark-fin protuberances not only suggest the ruins of medieval towers or Egyptian pyramids or Babylonian ziggurats, but they take us even further back, into geological time, to the weathering and erosion of mountains, the drifting of continents and the rising of oceans. From the momentary and the human – the child building a sandcastle, the artist registering the play of sunset light on rippling waves – Robinson takes his vision up and out to the register of the cosmic, the sublime.

1. For a thorough discussion and analysis of Robinson's 'system', see Rex Butler, 'William Robinson: depicting invisible distance', in Lynne Seear and Julie Ewington (eds.), Brought to Light II: Contemporary Australian Art 1966-2006 from the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, Queensland Art Gallery Publishing, Brisbane, 2007, pp. 259 - 267
2. William Robinson, in Lou Klepac (ed.), William Robinson: paintings 1987-2000, Beagle Press, Sydney, 2001, p. 109
3.  Lynne Seear (ed.), Darkness and Light: the Art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, p. 133
4. ibid., p. 112