Fred Williams' Gouaches

Fred Williams was born in Melbourne in 1927 and from the age of sixteen he knew he wanted to be an artist. His earliest surviving works are a pair of watercolours of Diamond Bay, Sorrento, which he believed he painted when he was fifteen. Watercolour — more particularly, gouache, which is watercolour into which white body colour has been mixed to lessen its transparency - continued to be a favoured medium until his death in 1982.

Williams was naturally gifted; painting came easily to him. When he set out to do so he would begin quickly and work rapidly to finish the task he had set himself. This was particularly true of his work in gouache. On outdoor sketching trips he would key himself to paint during the drive out. He would procrastinate over the choice of stopping place or walk beyond the first good spot, but once having found the motif and set out his water and paints and large and small brushes he worked with both hands at once. The background was usually put down using small house painters' brushes; paint was mixed on a plate or applied directly from the tube to the paper. The spatial depth of the picture was constantly checked by turning the work upside down. Painting proceeded from then on with the work either way up. It rarely took him thirty minutes to finish a painting.

Often the landscape being painted reflected that seen on the drive out, or the hill, paddock and trees beside and behind him. The particular was subordinated to a degree that makes it impossible for those not with him to identify the actual places of these landscapes.

In an interview with James Gleeson in 1978 about his paintings in the Australian National Gallery collection Williams remarked, 'l am basically an artist who sees things in terms of paint, and if I don't see it, I overwork it and wreck it. And do it on purpose too. I never consider a picture to be finished. I will always go back and have a bang at them. Of course, I have an enormous fail rate.'

Of the four or five gouaches completed on any day's painting trip, less than half survived the artist's scrutiny. He often began work by making a record of the day, the spot, the weather, the picnic place and those who were there. While these pieces were often charming, they were the first to go. Fire, You Yangs, 1963, is a rare survivor.

Williams wished to contribute to what he saw as the continuing story of Australian art. In painting the landscape he wanted more than a record of its appearance. He characteristically ignored the changes of colour from season to season in order to emphasize what he knew of the nature and structure and colour of the landscape beneath the season's cladding. He worked to capture the particular essence of the Australian landscape. He felt he succeeded in the quickly painted landscapes when nothing muddied and passages of light and tone-colour, and scale, were all resolved. He rejected those gouaches where there were areas the eye could not get round, where the eye path from foreground to distance was not clear both horizontally and diagonally. There were long periods when he worked in the studio on gouaches begun in the field, adding finishing touches or repainting others from them. He wanted the paintings to breathe, to be free of mistakes and literal landscape references.

The target was always to have one day's outdoor painting each week but this was never thought of simply as a one-day excursion. Williams described his procedure to Gleeson: 'The day before I go out I prepare my material, which is a fairly big job, and I make sure that I don't do any work, and I also make sure that I don't drink too much the night before, if possible, and I also have an early night and then I wake up and I attack it, and of course it works one in five. You know, sometimes four times out of five you make a complete mess of it and so on. But on the other hand, I work on the assumption that I don't want to impose anything on the landscape, and I don't care where the landscape is, it doesn't worry me, just so long as it is a place where I can work freely. Then it takes me a day to get over it. I can literally do nothing the next day. So really it is a three-day exercise, which is a fair bit out of a week. I haven't been trying to impose anything on the landscape, I've simply let the landscape come to me as it were. It's working away and never thinking that anything that I am doing is of any value or important except simply as going out and recording in formal terms.'

In this last statement lies the key to Williams's work and his success. For the pictures to be successful they had to contain the essence of particular places, but seen in formal terms. One day while Williams was a member of the Council of the Australian National Gallery and the Gallery was considering the acquisition of a late painting by Corot, we set out from Paris to check the quality and condition of a number of that artist’s late works which had been given to the art gallery at Reims during his lifetime. The day started well with stand-up coffee and rolls in a café near the hotel and we drove from the city into a landscape shrouded in fog. As the morning advanced and the fog lifted Fred became more and more ill tempered. We pleaded why and were told, ‘Just look at that, just look at that.’ The elements of a very formal landscape were emerging in marvellous graduated harmony. The foreground, distance and sky read as three tones, dark, mid and light, and within each of these major areas there were beautifully adjusted paler and darker tones. Overall, a landscape of nine tones and subdued colours. ‘Just look at that, I have to fight with the Australian landscape to find that.’

Worrying over the problems of Corot’s late work and looking at the composed French countryside Williams had realized the enormity of one of the problems he faced in his work: how to see in terms of paint and formal order our basically monotonous landscape of enormous distances, without symmetry, with haphazard and sparse trees. He said to Gleeson, ‘But it’s perfectly true, in Australia there is no focal point, and obviously it was too good a thing for me to pass up the fact that if there is to be no focal point in the landscape it had to be built into the paint.’

He fought what he felt were his old-fashioned abilities to record appearances and struggled to find stylistic solutions to his problems. Painting and drawing in every medium, engraving and etching were all equally important for him. The stylistic innovations he achieved in one medium were deliberately carried over into the next. ‘There has never been a picture that I have ever painted that I couldn’t turn round and re-engrave. It should keep going ad infinitum. I can see bits that I want to change and that’s what it is all about to me.’ The successively more vaporous watercolours of 1961 and 1962 were the basis for dark sugar aquatints with engraving that he made later in the year and from these came the most innovative painting he made to that date, pictures of vertical sapling forests.

In 1943, at sixteen, Williams enrolled at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. There, as always later, he enjoyed his teachers and learning and sough out examples of other artists’ work to inspire and help him. His earliest landscape watercolours in this show were painted knowing the excellent collection of English watercolours in the National Gallery of Victoria. The landscape paintings of his student years in London were painted out of curiosity about particular landscapes and a desire to compete with English artists on their home ground.

In London, Williams was a figure painter of nudes, portraits, genre, and the music hall. The gouaches he painted there were made on the cardboard pieces that remain when window mounts are cut for works on paper. He obtained them from the picture framers where he worked.

In his interview Gleeson asked Williams if he felt strongly about the Australian landscape before he went to England:

F.W. 'No, I didn't. It did not strike me until I came back on board a ship, and I stepped off the ship and it struck me. Just coming into that island that you come to in Freemantle Harbour. And then going for a ride outside of Freemantle, it struck me very strongly in December 1956.'

J.G. 'From that moment you sensed the strangeness...?

F.W. 'Yes, whatever it was, I just thought I would like to paint some pictures of it and I set about doing it.'

Gradually the Australian landscape pushed figure painting aside. Then Williams realized he wanted to say something about the landscape and he looked and worked obsessively at it.

F.W. 'There is a certain amount of rhetoric involved in my work. One of the thoughts I have had about Australia is the fact that it is the oldest continent, in the sense that it is flat, and I have always been fascinated to think that the water in the Snowy River leaves Kosciusko, and seven months later it comes out in Adelaide; seven months, because the landscape is so flat. It just moves so slowly, a bit of a tip here and there. So there is no such thing as a landscape that goes up and down in Australia, it is horizontal.'

Over a few months in 1970-71 this observation led to the invention of the strip paintings. They were preceded by a number of gouaches on which Williams had used masking tape to create shaped areas within which to paint. When he was invited to paint from a high-rise office block in Collins Street he saw the view was largely of the horizon. In recording on the same sheet the views from windows on opposite sides of the room the strip gouaches were born.

Williams believed his last gouaches were his greatest. He had seen Weipa and the Cape York Peninsula, and it had overwhelmed him, but 'I managed to get on top of that one,'

It is tragic that an artist who so deliberately paced himself died before his fullest potential was realized. This exhibition, which is the first to show the full range of his work in the medium, serves as a memorial to our loss.