WILLIAM ROBINSON

Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney

William Robinson, Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney, April 1998, cat. 5

This work has not been lined and has the original stretcher. There are no visible defects or retouchings. Overall excellent original condition. Framed in a plain timber box frame.
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Storm Landscape with Antarctic Beech was one of a baker's dozen of major works in a sell-out show of 43 paintings held at the Ray Hughes Gallery Sydney in April 1998.  The key picture in the exhibition was the remarkable Creation Landscape – the Ancient Trees (1997, private collection), which attracted both cachet and controversy when The Australian's art critic Giles Auty pronounced it an undoubted masterpiece, 'among the most remarkable landscapes – and visions – ever produced in the history of Australian painting.'  Auty was hardly less enthusiastic about the exhibition as a whole, writing: 'I doubt whether any single living Australian artist has been the subject of a more significant exhibition in a private gallery during the past fifty years... I have seldom seen an exhibition in which so many works are resolved so successfully.'¹

 

By the late 1990s, Robinson had been painting his revolving landscapes for more than a decade.  From a singular, albeit twisted point of view, the pictures had expanded to accommodate multiple, simultaneous perspectives.  The slightly comic little self-portrait figures had been banished or were unborn.  The hard edges and little impasto strokes of the mid 1980s works had softened into a light-dappled mossy depth, a kind of pastel effect achieved in oil.  Scale and time frame stretched to encompass the sublime and the prehistoric.  As the artist himself describes his experience of the Springbrook mountain rainforest:

 

'I had to discover this landscape, take it apart and find out how to paint it with my own vision.  I immerse myself in it and paint a multi-vision, as if I am going for a walk up into the trees, peering down into the creek, and across to that mountain, and still sensing that feeling of being back up on the ridge looking down at the light falling into that deep gorge.  I'm not only observing what I see, but contemplating things remembered and anticipating others, so both sides of the mountain might be painted.'²

 

 

In the works of 1997 – 98, 'all that is solid melts into air'.  Robinson's painterly alchemy softens or dissolves the barriers between the elements.  In the present work, the earth is a submarine green, while the sky becomes or reflects a creek (or vice versa).  A zip of lightening joins heaven and earth.  Cascading trails of rainbow colours drift across the middle of the composition, the refracted light of mist or the spray of waterfalls.  Everything spins: the Antarctic Beech of the title (Nothofagus moorei), a primeval, 100 million-year-old Gondwanaland species, revolves stop-motion around the centre of the painting, dividing and tracking space like the hands of a clock.  As we look up (or is it down?) into the canopy, clumps of tree trunks transform themselves into palm fronds. 

 

This is landscape which combines the bombast of the imperial explorer and the humility of the naturalist, the mega-macroscopic and the mini-microscopic.  A major work from a key period by an important late twentieth-century painter, it clearly explains and justifies Auty's extravagant encomium.

 

 

Giles Auty, 'An artist to celebrate', The Weekend Australian, 4-5 April 1998, p. 25 William Robinson, quoted in Lynne Fern, William Robinson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 53