07 June 2012

Art I like - Fred Williams

Bush fire in Northern Territory (source)
Burnt landscape  (source)   
The burnt landscape exudes desolation just as Paul Nash's Totes Meer does.  

Fred Williams evolved a visual shorthand to represent the vulnerability of the vegetation. Is it that he's so economical with his brush strokes? Not really - it's more that he lets the negative space become an important element; something invisible is happening in that negative space. 

See many, many more of his wonderful Australian landscapes here, both paintings and prints. He's an artist I keep going back to.


1 comment:

Dijanne Cevaal said...

Likewise Margaret- and there is a most wonderful exhibition of his work on at the NGV Ian Potter centre- I have been twice already and bought the wonderful catalogue- a luxury but he really did find a language to interpret the Australian bush- to capture it's messiness and somehow it's emptiness by his use of the negative space- however the Age Reviewer Robert Nelson was not impressed said the work was dogged and some other things- I really wondered whether he had seen the same exhibition!http://blogos-haha.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/fred-williams-infinite-horizons-ngv.html
Williams also did a lot of print making especially in his England/Europe years but I have never seen a collection of these.