Fred Williams
Birth name	Frederick Ronald Williams
Born	1927 Melbourne, Australia
Died	1982 Hawthorn, Victoria
Nationality	Australian
Field	Painting, Printmaker
Training	National Gallery School, Melbourne, Chelsea School of Art, London
Works	Pilbara series (1979–81)
Awards	Order of the British Empire (OBE)

Fred Williams' Upwey Landscape 1965 painted in Upwey, Victoria

Frederick Ronald (Fred) Williams is an Australian painter and printmaker. This article is about the Australian city; the name may also refer to City of Melbourne or Melbourne city centre (also known as The CBD). ... Hawthorn is a residential suburb of Melbourne, Australia, in the state of Victoria. ... Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... For other uses , see Painting (disambiguation). ... Printmaking is a process for producing a work of art in ink; the work (called a print) is created indirectly, through the transfer of ink from the surface upon which the work was originally drawn or otherwise composed. ... Upwey, Victoria is a residential suburb in hilly surrounds 34 km east-south-east of Melbourne and 2 km west of Belgrave, Victoria. ... Painting by Rembrandt self-portrait Detail from Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez, in which the painter portrayed himself at work For the computer graphics program, see Corel Painter. ... Printmaking is a process for producing a work of art in ink; the work (called a print) is created indirectly, through the transfer of ink from the surface upon which the work was originally drawn or otherwise composed. ...

He was born in 1927 in Melbourne, Australia. This article is about the Australian city; the name may also refer to City of Melbourne or Melbourne city centre (also known as The CBD). ...

He was one of Australia’s most important artists, and one the twentieth century’s major painters of the landscape. He had more than seventy solo exhibitions during his career in Australian galleries, as well as the exhibition Fred Williams - Landscapes of a Continent at the MoMA in New York in 1977. This article does not cite its references or sources. ... General Electric GE90-115B fanblade, on display at MOMA. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. ... Midtown Manhattan, looking north from the Empire State Building, 2005 New York City (officially named the City of New York) is the most populous city in the state of New York and the entire United States. ...

From 1943 to 1947 Williams studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, at first part-time and then full-time from 1945 at the age of 16. The Gallery School was traditional and academic, with a long and prestigious history. He also began lessons under George Bell the following year, who had his own art school in Melbourne. This continued until 1950. Bell was a conservative modern artist but a very influential teacher. George Bell (born December 1, 1878 in Melbourne; died October 23, 1966) in Melbourne) was a famous Australian painter. ...

Between 1951 and 1956, Williams studied part-time at the Chelsea School of Art, London (now Chelsea College of Art and Design) and in 1954 he did an etching course at the Central School of Arts and Craft. He subsidised his art practice by working in a picture-framer’s shop. He returned to Melbourne in 1957. This article is about the capital of England and the United Kingdom. ... Chelsea College of Art and Design (North Block). ...

He married Lyn Watson in 1960, and had work included in the 'Recent Australian Painting' exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and 'Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionism, Modern' at the Tate Gallery. The Whitechapel Gallery, founded 1901, was one of the first publicly-funded galleries for temporary exhibitions in London. ... The Tate Gallery in the United Kingdom is a network of four galleries: Tate Britain (opened 1897), Tate Liverpool (1988), Tate St Ives (1993), Tate Modern (2000), with a complementary website Tate Online (1998). ...

Williams had three daughters with Lynn: Isobel, Louise and Kate. In 1963 the couple moved to Upwey, Victoria in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, a location that would have a decisive impact on his work. In 1964 they travelled through Europe on a Helena Rubenstein Scholarship. In 1969 Williams moved to Hawthorn, an inner suburb of Melbourne. Upwey, Victoria is a residential suburb in hilly surrounds 34 km east-south-east of Melbourne and 2 km west of Belgrave, Victoria. ... The Dandenong Ranges are a set of mountain ranges, east of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. ... For other uses, see Europe (disambiguation). ... Helena Rubinstein (born 1871 Kraków, Poland - 1965 New York, USA) was a Polish-American cosmetics industrialist. ... Hawthorn is a residential suburb of Melbourne, Australia, in the state of Victoria. ...

In 1976 he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and awarded a Doctorate of Law (Honoris Causa) by Monash University in 1980. The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by King George V. The Order includes five classes in civil and military divisions; in decreasing order of seniority, these are Knight Grand Cross or Dame Grand Cross (GBE) Knight Commander... Robert Menzies Building at the Clayton Campus Monash University is a public university with campuses located in Australia, Malaysia and South Africa. ...

Williams won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting twice; in 1966 with Upwey Landscape and in 1976 with Mt. Kosciusko. Wynne Prize, Australian landscape painting or figure sculpture art prize. ...

His painting Upwey Landscape (1965) sold for $1,987,700 in one of the final auctions of Christie's in Australia in April 2006, which was the second highest price for an Australian work. [1] [2] The previous highest price for one of Williams' paintings was $5,875,000 for You Yangs Landscape in 1963. The Christies auction house in South Kensington, London Christies American branch in Rockefeller Center, New York Christies is a fine art auction house, the largest and by some accounts the oldest in the world. ...

He died in 1982, in Hawthorn, Victoria, from lung cancer at age 55. Hawthorn is a residential suburb of Melbourne, Australia, in the state of Victoria. ...

Work

After mainly working with figures in early paintings and etchings, he began painting landscapes after returning to Melbourne in 1957, which remained the major theme in his art.

While learning etching and printing in London, he produced vivid caricatured sketches of contemporary London life. It was during this period that he established his method of reworking the same motif a number of times in a number of mediums and very often over a number of years.

As an artist concerned with form over subjectivity, Williams' approach struck a jarring note against the unity of many of his close associates such as John Brack, Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman, the authors of the famous ‘Antipodean’ manifesto of 1959. Williams' work was excluded from their major exhibition. As heirs to the expressionist tradition, the Antipodeans lauded a spontaneous, improvised approach to painting and saw the function of art as vested in its expressive potential. They had little time for - and, in fact, denounced - the 'new' art emerging from Europe, the influences which were increasingly informing Williams' development. The Bar (1954) John Brack (1920 - 11 February 1999 in Melbourne, Victoria) was a notable Australian painter. ... A tapestry which is a greatly enlarged version of Arthur Boyds painting hangs in the Great Hall of Parliament House, Canberra Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd AC OBE (20 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was a member of the prominent Boyd artistic dynasty in Australia, with many relatives being painters... Charles Blackmans The Cigarette shop (Running home) (1934) Charles Blackman (born August 12, 1928) is an Australian artist. ... On White II by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923. ...

On his return to Australia, Williams saw the aesthetic potential of the Australian bush in its inherent plasticity. His interest lay in finding an aesthetic 'language' with which to express the very un-European Australian landscape. This was grounded in establishing a pictorial equivalent to the overwhelmingly vast, primarily flat landscape, in which the traditional European relationship of foreground to background breaks down, necessitating a complete re-imagining of compositional space. In this, Williams looked to the approach taken by Australian Aboriginal artists. Aesthetics (or esthetics) (from the Greek word αισθητική) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... Composition is the plan, placement or arrangement of the elements of art in a work. ... Australian Aborigines are the indigenous peoples of Australia. ...

He did this by tilting the landscape up against the picture plane, so that frequently the only indicator of horizontal recession is the presence of a horizon line, or where clumps of trees huddle closer together towards the horizon, suggesting recession. Where no horizon is visible, the landscape runs fully parallel to the picture plane, as in the major You Yangs series of the mid-1960s. Here, calligraphic knots of pigment indicate the presence of single trees against the earth, as if seen from the air (example). A picture plane is the imaginary flat surface which is usually located between the station point and the object being viewed and is ordinarily a vertical plane perpendicular to the horizontal projection of the line of sight to the objects order of interest. ... Horizon. ...

In the last years of his career, Williams produced more landscape series with strong themes, his last being the Pilbara series (1979–81), which remained intact as it was acquired by Con-Zinc Rio Tinto Group, the mining company that had invited him to explore the arid north-west region of Australia. The Pilbara is one of the nine regions of Western Australia. ... Rio Tinto is a multinational mining and resources group founded originally in 1873. ...

References

• Kirsty Grant,Fred Williams: Pilbara Series, National Gallery Of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006
• Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams, 1927-82, Bay Books, Sydney; second revised edition, 1987
• James Mollison, A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1989

External links

• Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
• Fred Williams website
• National Gallery of Victoria
• Tate Gallery
• Fred Williams Image Gallery

(If anyone wants a portrait photo of Fred Williams, they can find it at http://www.portrait.gov.au/collection/1/832/med_Fred%20Williams.jpg)