ART | TRANSFIELD

Fred Williams was born in Melbourne in 1927 and studied at the George Bell School. In 1951 he travelled to London and studied and painted there until 1956. After he returned to Australia he developed his unique style of landscape abstraction with a series of paintings of the bush at Mittagong. You Yangs 1964 is one of hundreds of works – paintings, gouaches and prints – based on this particular landscape which Williams explored in detail from 1963 until the mid 1970s. Williams has been one of the most important landscape painters in the history of Australian art, and like Roberts and Streeton, Heysen and Drysdale, his art has permanently changed the way in which we perceive our landscape. He died in 1982.

Catalogue extract from Works from the Transfield Collection, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, 24 May – 7 July 1985.