Essay about Abstraction Appraising Task 4

Abstraction Appraising Task
Fred Williams’ ‘You Yangs Landscape’ and Tom Roberts’ ‘Trawool Landscape’

Fredrick (Fred) Williams was one of the most influential Australian artists of the twentieth century who revolutionised the way in which we perceive the Australian landscape. He was a figurative artist who passionately valued abstract qualities, creating vastly original and distinctive interpretations of the Australian landscape. “No artist of the late part of this century has had a more original vision of the Australian Landscape than Fred Williams.” – Australian Art Collector, 1999. Williams’ inspiration often developed through the unique qualities of landscapes around Australia: from Victoria, to Tasmania, to Western Australia.

Expressionism was an extremely popular modern art movement during his time that motivated Fred Williams’ to sought the emotional experience in his paintings, rather than the physical depiction of reality. ‘You Yangs landscape’ is one of many of Fred Williams’ nonrepresentational artworks, being a painting (when compared to a representational artwork of the Australian landscape like Tom Roberts’ ‘Trawool landscape’) that does not attempt to represent or reference reality. Fred Williams was determined in finding a language in which he could effectively express the abstract experience of the Australian landscape, and through his ‘You Yangs’ series, he did just that. Fred Williams managed to successfully depict the essence of an Australian landscape, without specifically representing or referencing reality, through the manipulation of specific elements such as colour, line, tone, and shape, and the manipulation of specific principles such as composition, repetition, perspective, pattern, emphasis, contrast, and harmony.

An area of granite ridges and plains of low vegetation scattered across open areas inspired Fred Williams’ ‘You Yangs landscape’. The painting shows how Williams developed his characteristic technique of filling the picture plane with landscape, ignoring the horizon line that is kilometers beyond the paddocks. Williams recognised that one of the significant aspects of an Australian landscape was the random scatter of elements with no focal point (as represented in Tom Roberts’ ‘Trawool landscape’), therefore making ‘You Yangs landscape’ his personal response to the randomness of the terrain he encountered in the Victorian region. He portrays this randomness in ‘You Yangs landscape’ through the composition of the trees, bushes and rocks across the open ground. Williams was very mindful of the ways in which basic forms of trees, rocks and bushes could become structural elements in the composition of the painting - this is particularly evident to the left of the painting, where he structures these elements closer together in order to create vertical and horizontal lines, indicating the fences and roads that divided the paddock. This particular composition also creates subtle shape and a sense of order; the artwork appears to be separated into three parts, additionally interpreting the sense of a paddock (see picture right). Through the manipulation of composition, Fred Williams was able to emphasise the immense openness of Australia and successfully depict the essence of an Australian landscape abstractly.

The elements that make up the composition of the artwork are carefully interpreted in Fred Williams’ ‘You Yangs landscape’ through the work of brushstroke, paint and colour. The painting is composed of small delicate touches and strokes of paint that create the depictions of trees, bushes and rocks. When compared to the imitative and realistic composition of elements in the representational artwork by Tom Roberts, Fred Williams uses a strong abstract approach by representing the elements through dabs of a brown, earthy palette, the distinctive quick flicks of lines interpreting the trunks of trees with expressive marks of thick impasto paint and dots ranging from white to

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