3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON INTERVIEWS: FRED WILLIAMS 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: Let’s take our present holdings chronologically, and begin with the earliest one we hold, which is a portrait of Christopher Underhill

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes—the son of Tony Underhill, the artist. I was a babysitter at the time for the Underhills.

JAMES GLEESON: The date is what? Have we got a date on that?

FRED WILLIAMS: It would have been around 1952 or 1953. Does it say?

JAMES GLEESON: No.

FRED WILLIAMS: I could check it, but it was about 1953. That’s when I—and they—lived in Chelsea.

JAMES GLEESON: This was when you were in London?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, I lived in the same district. It is a bit trivial, but Shirley Deane was a book reviewer for The Manchester Guardian and she used to invite friends to come around, read the books, leave their comments, while they were babysitting.

JAMES GLEESON: Shirley Deane was who?

FRED WILLIAMS: Shirley Deane was the wife of Tony Underhill.

JAMES GLEESON: And the mother of Christopher?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: You told me earlier that Christopher has now grown up.

FRED WILLIAMS: He is grown up. I always had the impression that he was rather a sickly child, which is the way I painted him, and which I suspect he was. But he has grown up to be a very strapping lad. The particular time that I painted the picture was mid-summer in England, and it didn’t really get dark till 10 o'clock at night. I was babysitting from, say, 5.30 until about 3 o'clock in the morning.

JAMES GLEESON How old was the boy then?

FRED WILLIAMS: The boy was perhaps seven, eight, or nine. He helped me paint the background of the picture. 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: Really? How?

FRED WILLIAMS: I think he chose the colour. I had a sock. I didn’t go much on brushes in those days; I only had a few odd brushes. He stroked most of it on.

JAMES GLEESON: With an old sock?

FRED WILLIAMS: With an old sock, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: In our present collection that’s the only work that we have that is of a figurative subject.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: But I know it figures in your graphic work, and recently you have come back to it. Is it a part of art that you are interested?

FRED WILLIAMS: I am terribly interested in it. To me it is a great oddity, but it is the only thing I was ever interested in, really. When I came back to Australia I looked at the landscape and I did see that there was something that I wanted to say. It became obsessive with me. Actually, I am more at home doing figures.

JAMES GLEESON: Did you not feel that thing about the Australian landscape before you went to England?

FRED WILLIAMS: No, I didn’t.

JAMES GLEESON: So it was a re-discovery.

FRED WILLIAMS: It did not strike me until I came back to Fremantle on board a ship. I stepped off the ship and it struck me—coming into that island when you come into Fremantle Harbour, and then going for a car ride outside of Fremantle. This was 1950, I think. It did strike me—it struck me very strongly.

JAMES GLEESON: It must have been later than 1950.

FRED WILLIAMS: It was December 1956.

JAMES GLEESON: And from that moment you sensed the strangeness and whatever it is in the Australian landscape?

FRED WILLIAMS: Whatever it was, I just thought that I would like to paint some pictures of it, and I set about doing it.

JAMES GLEESON: Before you went to England, which was in the early 1950s—

FRED WILLIAMS: In 1950, I think.

2 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: You hadn't really been interested in the Australian landscape at all?

FRED WILLIAMS: No, nor the English landscape. I certainly did go out and draw in the landscape, and I certainly made some watercolours and things, but it was curiosity more than anything else.

JAMES GLEESON: Do you feel now that going away and seeing other kinds of landscape was necessary for you to be able to see the Australian landscape?

FRED WILLIAMS: The answer is yes; I find that terribly important.

JAMES GLEESON: You take so much for granted when you live in a place and you are brought up with it; you don’t really look at it.

FRED WILLIAMS: That is right. That is probably true in my case. Probably the greatest picture I have ever looked at, in a sense, was El Greco’s Toledo.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a stunning painting.

FRED WILLIAMS: I find it one of the great pictures. I was certainly terribly interested in the Englishmen—Turner, Blake and Constable, and Palmer too, in a way. As a comparatively serious student it was a bit of a dilemma for me. It did occur to me fairly early in the piece that, if men like Turner or Constable had not lived, it would have not affected the course of Western art one little bit, which was a very sobering point for me. As much as I loved and admired them and thought that the flowers grew out of their ears, so to speak, I realised that it was the French school that was in the main course. My happy hunting ground, naturally, was the National Gallery, but it was the Victoria and Albert that had the interesting bits. I am not saying this very well—

JAMES GLEESON: I understand what you mean.

FRED WILLIAMS: In the mid-1950s I realised that painting, for me, was in France, not in England. But make no mistake—I certainly admired them, and I still do admire them, tremendously, but with the realisation that it could have happened without them.

JAMES GLEESON: The critical thing I think you have said is that, when you came back to Fremantle on your return to Australia, all that you had seen in Europe—all the art you had seen, perhaps—made you look at the Australian landscape and see it in a different way.

FRED WILLIAMS: I zeroed in on it, as it were. Many years later Greenberg came to Australia. He asked me why I did what I did, and gave him much the same reason as I have just given. He said: ‘Okay, lad. All you have to do now is to kick the arse out of it!’

3 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: Let’s see how you did. Now we move on to the more characteristic Fred Williams, the things people always think of. This is the one.

FRED WILLIAMS: I had a friend who lived at Sherbrooke, up in the Dandenong Ranges. I came back for three years in 1957. In the middle of that time I met my wife Lyn, at Sherbrooke.

JAMES GLEESON: You were living up there Fred?

FRED WILLIAMS: I wasn’t at that stage; I was living in the suburbs with my family. But it was going up there and being able to sort of work for, say, three or four days at a time that I was first able to come to grips with it.

JAMES GLEESON: The half-round pond.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, the half-round pond. I was working in the forest and, as you can see, they are a bit messy.

JAMES GLEESON: Where is Sherbrooke Forest?

FRED WILLIAMS: It is in the Dandenongs. Sherbrooke Forest is up on the ridge between Olinda and Sassafras, just out of Ferntree Gully. I can’t really explain where it is. I made a whole series of watercolours, which seem to have disappeared. There are a few around—perhaps 20 or 30 have survived. But that was not what I was up to. That was just me sort of trying to sort myself out. After that I had an opportunity through mutual friends. A man who had gone to the war with John Brack, a man called John Stevens, owned a very romantic bit of country outside of Mittagong in New South Wales. He invited me to go up and stay up there and just paint what I wanted to paint, how and when I liked. For someone who was terribly broke—I was working part-time for a picture framer— that was a great thing. So up there I went, and it was at Mittagong that I formulated my ideas. It was the sandstone country, all around the Blue Mountains.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

FRED WILLIAMS: I did that and I came back and had some exhibitions and so on. Then I went back and bought a house in the Dandenongs at Lysterfield.

JAMES GLEESON: Is that where I first met you?

FRED WILLIAMS: It probably is. Remember you came up and Lyn was wearing a dress that was made out of a pattern that you had designed?

JAMES GLEESON: That’s right. The landscape looked exactly like the kind of paintings you were doing at that time.

FRED WILLIAMS: That’s right, yes.

4 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: Tall thin trees.

FRED WILLIAMS: Tall thin trees.

JAMES GLEESON: So that was beyond Sherbrooke Forest—

FRED WILLIAMS: Beyond that, but using the symmetry of the trees and so on. But then in the sparse country down off the foothills of the Dandenong towards Lysterfield, running out the foothills, as it were, I got the idea of working in this fashion. The epitome of it was to go to the You Yangs. I more or less selected the You Yangs—

JAMES GLEESON: For a non-Melbournian, where are the You Yangs?

FRED WILLIAMS: They are just outside of Geelong.

JAMES GLEESON: South-east of Melbourne?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, just before you come to Geelong.

JAMES GLEESON: Is it a range—

FRED WILLIAMS: It is a rocky outcrop. It is probably the highest point in Melbourne. It is called Mt Flinders. I think Flinders actually surveyed Victoria from the Point. It is a national park, but unfortunately given over to sand gravellers, and they are digging it all up. Houses are being built right up to the foot of it now, so it won’t last forever.

JAMES GLEESON: Am I right in assuming that this triptych is one of the key works?

FRED WILLIAMS: It’s a synthesis, yes. It is using the sort of high skyline of Upwey, but in a more ethereal way because I have eliminated the tonal quality of it and used the sparsely modulated part of the country and put them all together. It is a synthesis of that sort of Victorian landscape.

JAMES GLEESON: When I first began to look at your work, one of the things that struck me, was the fact that you were the only person that I’d ever encountered who had come to terms with the fact that the Australian landscape was basically monotonous. Yet you seemed to be able to achieve this feeling of monotony without making the picture monotonous.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, it is monotonous; that is perfectly true. When I worked in England I made gouache paintings outside, mainly in Sussex, which is very lush. For every painter who sat down or stood up to paint in England—because of the Englishman’s love of the countryside—everything was symmetrical. They had planted trees here, put a church there—and everything was in the right place. But it is perfectly true that in Australia there is no focal point. Obviously, it was too

5 3 October 1978

good a thing for me to pass up. If there’s going to be no focal point in a landscape, then it had to build into the paint.

JAMES GLEESON: That is a very daring decision to have come to. To make a picture without a focal point—

FRED WILLIAMS: There is no focal point there.

JAMES GLEESON: You took it from nature, but to carry it into art—

FRED WILLIAMS: Australian’s just don’t pick the best spots. Catholics may build the church on the highest hill, but generally speaking Australians do not build their houses on the best spots. They do not consider it. The early pioneers may have, but they were very English. Once the first flush of Englishmen had left Australia, it became like a permanent camp, like a tent city everywhere. They did not think about where they put things.

JAMES GLEESON: It is a bit different in Sydney because, I suppose, the Harbour gave a focal point to it.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes. That is obvious.

JAMES GLEESON: It is not true of the countryside as a whole—the bush.

FRED WILLIAMS: The countryside outside of Sydney is very much like the rest of Australia.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

FRED WILLIAMS: Haphazard and like a permanent camp, a tent city. The galvanised iron roofs look like it too.

JAMES GLEESON: That was a very revolutionary thing to carry into art; to realise at all.

FRED WILLIAMS: It is a literary thing. I don’t think that in itself is important—only the pictures, if they are any good. Looking at these, I doubt it. Maybe some of them.

JAMES GLEESON: Nonsense!

FRED WILLIAMS: It must depend on the picture to tell the story, not you know. It is not a decision that I made.

JAMES GLEESON: You achieve this effect of unfocused elements, and yet the work hangs together.

6 3 October 1978

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, sure. Basically I want it to be a picture. I am a great museum person.

JAMES GLEESON: You know the history of art.

FRED WILLIAMS: I don’t know it, but I eventually see pictures hanging in museums, and the story is a continuous one. The field of the painting is terribly important.

JAMES GLEESON: Obviously you use a unifying colour. This spreads through the whole thing and gives it a unity.

FRED WILLIAMS: Plus the scale.

JAMES GLEESON: I am, perhaps, bringing my ideas into this, but one of the delights that I find in your paintings is that when you look at a tiny little detail it has the surprise and the vividness that you get when you look at a little leaf or a tiny plant—a detail in the landscape here. The overall effect can be one of unfocused monotony, yet in detail, little bits can have an opalescent beauty about them. It has occurred to me that, in the way you touch your colour onto the canvas in certain parts, you have this concentration of very beautiful little details over a broad area.

FRED WILLIAMS: If what you say is true, it is accidental.

JAMES GLEESON: It is not a conscious thing?

FRED WILLIAMS: That is what I would like to do. If I put a mark on the canvas and it’s not right, I very quickly take it out. If you read that into it, that is fine. I certainly think that one spot should be the whole thing or nothing.

JAMES GLEESON: I did not perhaps explain myself clearly. When you walk in the bush, the overall effect, if you are not looking closely at it, the general impression, is one of greyness, dullness, monotony. But if you look closely at the details, at the ribbing of a leaf, or something like that—

FRED WILLIAMS: I see.

JAMES GLEESON: Absolute, beautiful—

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, of course. I don’t think the bush is dull. I am a suburban boy. I would under no circumstances live in the bush. But I see that quite clearly.

JAMES GLEESON: In a little touch like that you find a merging, a blurring of colour that has almost an opalescent vividness about it.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes. If it works, then I would agree with you. I agree. They were the hardest pictures that I have ever had to paint, although I must confess

7 3 October 1978

that on the face value they look to be the easiest. I probably worked harder on those pictures, probably than I would have worked on any other series.

JAMES GLEESON: Do these follow on those tall ones that you did when you lived out Upwey?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, they do. I have used the format, to start with. My over- riding interest has always been in scale. I consider a thing to be in drawing when it is in scale. Drawing and scale to me are indissoluble; they are the same things. This You Yang one that the Gallery owns, 1963, is probably a rank failure compared to that one.

JAMES GLEESON: The triptych?

FRED WILLIAMS: The triptych, yes. On the other hand, I had to do that before I could do that.

JAMES GLEESON: So the You Yang was earlier?

FRED WILLIAMS: That was spotting it, but the passages in the picture were not resolved. There are areas where you can’t get around. They have clogged up, as it were. But I don’t make the mistake in this one; I have let them breathe and I have released them a little bit.

JAMES GLEESON: Fred, to go back a little bit to the sapling forest ones that you did—we don’t have any in the Gallery at the moment—they have always seemed to me to be almost oriental.

FRED WILLIAMS: I will have to admit straight away that it is purely my relationship, looking at the Post-Impressionists and Cézanne in particular—

JAMES GLEESON: You never really consciously set out to—

FRED WILLIAMS: Not really, no. I have become more conscious of it now. The only thing I would say about it is that in those days I knew that Australia was a little different, but I just didn't quite know what or how. So the oriental thing would have been extraneous at that stage.

JAMES GLEESON: I see.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes. I have certainly always been very interested—

JAMES GLEESON: So it was an intuitive thing. I see a very strong similarity between those paintings and the Japanese screens, where you see a forest, say, of pine trees.

8 3 October 1978

FRED WILLIAMS: I am sorry; you are talking about the triptych, are you? That was most certainly influenced by a Japanese screen or a Chinese screen. I thought you meant the sapling one.

JAMES GLEESON: I sense it in the sapling ones, but not so much as in ones where you get a strong vertical line.

FRED WILLIAMS: I will have to reverse my story. Yes, I was thinking about it then.

JAMES GLEESON: By that time you were.

FRED WILLIAMS: Certainly with the triptych I had it in mind, particularly the scale of it.

JAMES GLEESON: How strongly is there a hangover from Impressionism in your reaction? The way you evoke a kind of light and a feeling of colour seems to carry an inflection from Impressionism.

FRED WILLIAMS: I have thought about it, but not that much about it. I suppose it is really a question of what you can do and how you can do it. Painting has always been a terrible struggle for me. I have never tried consciously to divide my brush stroke, as the Impressionists did, as such. I have looked at so many hundreds of pictures, and thought about them and worried about the on, but I have never physically ever gone through that particular—

JAMES GLEESON: You never used the devices of the Impressionists?

FRED WILLIAMS: No; it didn’t really interest me. As you know, my favourite painter is Daumier. I like painters like Albert Pinkum Ryder, and Cézanne is the man I probably admire most, but my favourite painter probably would be Daumier. Plastic qualities have always interested me and the particular idea of Impressionism certainly did not have any interest for me. In fact, I found it quite repulsive in many ways.

JAMES GLEESON: That clarifies it. Clearly of importance to you is the way the painters put down the individual touch, the kind of thing a musician brings to say playing a piano. Are you conscious of the way you place a spot of gold or a group of colour notes on a surface?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes. I can only explain that by saying that I am basically an artist who sees things in terms of paint. If I don’t see it, I overwork it and wreck it—and do it on purpose too. I am like a dog in many ways. I never consider a picture finished. I will always go back and have a bang at them. I have an enormous fail rate, but I also make sure that I have plenty of pictures to work on.

9 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: How do you assess it, Fred? Is it a retinal thing? Is it something you remember from seeing in the landscape, and you want to approach the spirit of that in your painting?

FRED WILLIAMS: No, it’s nothing like that. That one is too difficult for me, Jim. I don’t know.

JAMES GLEESON: How do you know whether the picture succeeds for you? When do you know it succeeds? When it works purely on aesthetic level, and it looks good from whichever way you look at it? Or is it because it recreates for you the kind of experience you have had when you looked at the original landscape.

FRED WILLIAMS: I would have to take the first one.

JAMES GLEESON: Because it looks good from the point of view of painting?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, Some of the worst pictures I have ever painted have fulfilled the second qualification you have given. So I would have to take the first one. I am sure of it.

JAMES GLEESON: Okay, Fred. We will move on to the triptych. We have looked at the You Yangs, and the triptych. Do you feel from a personal point of view that the You Yang landscape of 1963 is not perhaps as good as the triptych, in your own assessment?

FRED WILLIAMS: Aesthetically it may be as good, but the triptych is certainly more successful. In the You Yang one, in the bottom left hand part some of the passages are a bit obscured, they are a bit muddy. The passages are not quite resolved. It does not even look so good. They are certainly better resolved.

JAMES GLEESON: We will pass to the next one now, the Upwey landscape. This is the one reproduced in Bernard Smith’s book, as Colour plate 2 of 40. We don’t have a photograph with us here, apart from that.

FRED WILLIAMS: No, but I know the picture fairly well. There are probably seven or eight pictures of this. There is one in the Newcastle Gallery and one in the Melbourne Gallery. Unfortunately one was lost in the fire. It didn’t get burnt; it just disappeared. I think this one was probably one of the best. The best one probably is in the BP collection in London, which I can show you a reproduction of.

JAMES GLEESON: Refresh my memory. Where is Upwey?

FRED WILLIAMS: Upwey? In the Dandenongs, up in the hills. Lysterfield is down on the slopes, where it becomes more sparse. I kept the skyline, but

10 3 October 1978

without the tonality. The You Yangs is much more spacious. You approach the You Yangs across great sweeping plains. You can see it coming for 15 miles.

JAMES GLEESON: In the triptych there is an implied horizon, but there’s no horizon for the You Yangs. There is a very definite one—

FRED WILLIAMS: A definite one, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It is a major part of your concept in the Upwey landscape.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes. The Upwey pictures are based on very strong diagonals. when I paint the pictures, particularly these, I always physically put wires across the pictures from corner to corner. I always paint them upside down. I always make sure that the tension of the picture emanates from the middle, going out. In some of the pictures you can see that the lines are caught in the paint. The reason there is that sort of tree on the end here is that the wires pass through there. It is not a good reproduction—they would be much paler—but the redwood comes through here, and then I would work my way through all these areas and work back in the focal point here. I think that device was used—

JAMES GLEESON: Classical landscape painters.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, particularly by Corot and some of the Barbizon school painters.

JAMES GLEESON: Is this area of the actual landscape a complete square?

FRED WILLIAMS: An off-square, always off-square. But if you take that to that there, then you’ll find that is there. George Bell taught me how to use dynamic symmetry.

JAMES GLEESON: I was getting on to that.

FRED WILLIAMS: The real square of the picture is not that way looking, at it up the right way, because it is off-square. The real picture is painted here, and they sort of become very blurred up here. So my real picture is being painted within here, in there.

JAMES GLEESON: So upside down.

FRED WILLIAMS: And I make sure that I never turn the picture up until I have finished, and then look at it.

JAMES GLEESON: Do you work on it then—touch it, paint it?

FRED WILLIAMS: I try not to, but sometimes, naturally, I do. It is a game.

11 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: This answers that earlier question that I asked: whether you think of a painting as primarily a work of art or a re-evocation of a visual experience.

FRED WILLIAMS: There has to be some explanation as to why I have always been interested in painting figures and nudes and portraits. When I went to art school that’s all I ever could do. In fact, Bill Dargie said I was a reincarnation of George Lambert—when I was painting portraits, that is. There has to be some reason why I did stick to the landscape as long as I did. I just wanted something where I could move with great freedom, and I felt that I was at one with it.

JAMES GLEESON: Fred, just on a matter of technique, do you habitually work on a painting upside down?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes I do.

JAMES GLEESON: You always start …

FRED WILLIAMS: I’m absolutely at the… I start the day out and I work on the picture upside down and I’m, at the end of the day I’m amazed you know, when I turn it around, how stupid I am when I look at the picture frontally. I just do not see it, you know. Mainly because I work on so many pictures at a time, maybe. But I sometimes think that I’m absolutely bloody well blind looking at them straight on. But working on them upside down, I can forget what the subject is…

JAMES GLEESON: Yes I understand…

FRED WILLIAMS: It becomes a formal…

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a kind of freedom, a releasing you from…

FRED WILLIAMS: And I sometimes do them sideways, but generally upside down. The older I get, the worse the problem becomes. I am strictly an upside down painter in that sense. I hope this sounds all right does it? Any idiot can do them up the other way.

JAMES GLEESON: But yet Fred you go out into the landscape every week…?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, I do.

JAMES GLEESON: You don’t stand on your head there?

FRED WILLIAMS: No. My attitude is quite simple.

JAMES GLEESON: This is gathering storage material?

FRED WILLIAMS: When I say I go out to the landscape once a day, I mean that it is not just an excursion. The day before I go out, I prepare my material, which is

12 3 October 1978

a fairly big job. I stretch canvas and I make sure that I don’t do any work. I also make sure that I don’t drink too much the night before, if possible. I also have an early night and I wake up and I attack it. It works one time in five, sometimes, four times out of five. You make a complete balls of it and so on. On the other hand, I work on the assumption that I don’t want to impose anything on the landscape. I don’t care where the landscape is; it just doesn’t worry me. Just so long as it’s the sort of place where I can work freely. But it always takes me, when I come back, a day to get over it. I can literally do nothing then so really it’s a three-day exercise, which is a fair bit out of a week. So it’s not the sort of business of going out one day. I do take it comparatively seriously, and my fail rate is the one week out of five. Naturally, being oil paint I put them aside and look at them in six months time. I suppose the more successful ones is where I’ve sort of been able to sort work freely when I haven’t been trying to impose anything on the landscape, I’ve simply acted as a… I’ve been prescribed or not, simply letting the landscape come to me as it were. No ego stuff at all. It is facile stuff, in a way, but it’s just simply working away, but never thinking that anything that I was doing is of any value or importance except simply going out and recording in formal terms.

JAMES GLEESON: These are the final paintings or…?

FRED WILLIAMS: No.

JAMES GLEESON: These are sketches.

FRED WILLIAMS: These are sketches. These are just studies, there’s no… and up until the last three or four years, well four years maybe, I did exclusively in gouache or watercolours occasionally but mainly gouache. But now I’ve simply taken to do them… doing them in oil paint.

JAMES GLEESON: In oil paint.

FRED WILLIAMS: In oil paint, yes. I have started using American canvas which is rather fine, like linen, painted on thin linen. Trying as much as possible never to use brushes but simply once again using socks and pieces of rag and things like that.

JAMES GLEESON: I see.

FRED WILLIAMS: I usually work on four canvases 38 inches by 42. And there’s a profusion of them at the moment I must have made 300 or 400 of them.

JAMES GLEESON: Now do you work on those…?

FRED WILLIAMS: I don’t exhibit them by the way except very rarely. I mean the only one I’ve exhibited is that one that went to the Perth gallery. Do you know that one?

13 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: I think you pointed it out.

FRED WILLIAMS: Pointed out… we’ll that’s all done on the one day.

JAMES GLEESON: When you get them home and look at them again say in a few weeks or a month's time, do you touch them again, work on them again, or do you?

FRED WILLIAMS: Very rarely. One thing I have learnt is that it is best not to touch them. simply repaint it. It is an enormous job of stretching canvas and stuff like that. Instincts have always told me not to touch it, but leave them. But also just as equally, don’t exhibit them—keep them.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. This is a way of getting in touch with the landscape and then what you do in your studio evolves beyond that.

FRED WILLIAMS: There could be some element in what I have been looking at that will eventually. But if I mess it up by reworking it, or saying I think it's not right, I think that would be silly, crazy.

JAMES GLEESON: Understood.

FRED WILLIAMS: Right?

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Now, Silver and Grey.

FRED WILLIAMS: I must confess that I like this one, you know. I think this is one of my favourite pictures and I think it’s a good one. I’m very pleased that it’s gone to the National Collection. It was in the Travelodge Collection I think. It didn't win a Travelodge prize, but miraculously they bought the picture, which cost more than the prize.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Brought through Joseph Brown in 1976.

FRED WILLIAMS: That’s right. Well they gave it to Joseph Brown to sell.

JAMES GLEESON: Where does that come? Is this… what date is that first?

FRED WILLIAMS: That should be 1970.

JAMES GLEESON: 1970.

FRED WILLIAMS: So that’s twenty years after, no that’s not twenty years—that’s 1957, about 12 years after I came back from England. In many ways it probably is a summing up of that particular period that I was doing. And after that I come back, you know, to the full frontal approach again, like Landscape with a goose, and then in the big Yellow landscape…

14 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: Has that got any special name?

FRED WILLIAMS: I think it’s called Yellow landscape. Its been one of the banes of my life that I can never think of a name for a picture. Some painter once said that, when you paint a picture, you should always have a party and let someone name it for you. I would subscribe to that, because I can’t. I called that one Landscape with a goose because there was a little goose…

JAMES GLEESON: A shape down there.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, a goose. A goose wandered in to it.

JAMES GLEESON: Silver and grey.

FRED WILLIAMS: Silver and grey, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Was there any particular area you had in mind?

FRED WILLIAMS: It is a combination of Lysterfield and the You Yangs. It is also a combination of my engraving, the etching, the etching and aquatints turned to engraving and digging a hole in the plate.

JAMES GLEESON: You might remember when we were looking for the missing painting, this was among the drawings, and I thought it was a photograph of…

FRED WILLIAMS: That’s right. That is exactly what it’s about. I have always thought etching was a very important medium, a major medium, simply because it can be altered and changed and pushed and shoved the way oil painting can be.

JAMES GLEESON: Even the title Silver and grey suggests a sort of etching or engraving doesn’t it?

FRED WILLIAMS: It does, yes. So I think they are a sort of a culmination and particularly because it combines with the graphic.

JAMES GLEESON: So that was a sort of alternate, not an alternate, a parallel line of interest for you, developments and graphs?

FRED WILLIAMS: Oh yes. Unfortunately I’ve been letting it go lately, because I just find the pressures of you know, doing different things has turned my etching very much into a junk shop which I showed you earlier. It is a pity, but the older I get the more I want to do and the less I—

JAMES GLEESON: Have time to do.

15 3 October 1978

FRED WILLIAMS: Even painting the landscapes outside in oil painting is a bit of a drag on the week. Because it doesn’t always go smoothly, you know, as you can well imagine.

JAMES GLEESON: Fred, we all agree that that’s a great one, and it is. We are lucky to have that in our collection.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: I am particularly interested in the fact that you feel that it is related to a whole area of experiment in the graphic field.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes. Because that’s… but once again upside down I was making sure the picture works like that, in a small area…

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

FRED WILLIAMS: …or it works like that…

JAMES GLEESON: In… I see. As you enlarge it from any area it’s…

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, drawing is terribly important in the sense that I get the scale right. And then finally if you can convince people that it’s a landscape or it’s something. I evoke, I’ve tried to evoke that sort of…

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. It certainly comes through.

FRED WILLIAMS: But there has never been a picture I’ve ever painted, and well say to get it to that stage, that I’ve never thought that I couldn’t turn around a re- engrave it.

JAMES GLEESON: It works just as well.

FRED WILLIAMS: And it should keep going.

JAMES GLEESON: That one does, too.

FRED WILLIAMS: It should keep going ad infinitum, it should keep going forever. And I can see bits in it now that I you know, might want to change or something. And that’s what it’s all about for me. I mean that bit, you know, looks a bit, there’s something, a bit I don’t like, but…

JAMES GLEESON: Most people always get that sort of feeling, but it still works. The large Yellow.

FRED WILLIAMS: Oh the large one…

JAMES GLEESON: No this one comes first doesn’t it?

16 3 October 1978

FRED WILLIAMS: Tthey both come more or less together.

JAMES GLEESON: Do they? Were they in the same show at Rudy Komon’s?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes they were. This now relates back to going back to the landscape, working on those four… sometimes I put two of the…of the four canvases I take sometimes I put two together and paint one picture on it, like that Chinese one we just looked at this morning.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, the one that had been damaged?

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, the one that was damaged. But in this particular case I did half a dozen paintings, about 30 to 40 and then finally doing the final picture. And I’m never too sure whether the whole six pictures shouldn’t all go together. The whole lot should go together, or whether one should not show your hand too much and just show the final picture.

JAMES GLEESON: In a way the sort of panoramic feeling like you have in those Murray River ones in Adelaide are very characteristic of your work? The way you take this view in strips over a whole area, and those bush fire ones you showed me are the same thing.

FRED WILLIAMS: That’s right, yes. I guess there’s a certain amount of rhetoric you know, involved in my work in the sense that you know, I have one of the few sort of thoughts I’ve ever had about Australia is the fact that it is the oldest continent in the sense that it is flat. I have always been fascinated to think that the water leaves the Murray, leaves the Snowy Mountains, leaves Kosciusko if you were to tip a bucket of water into … up in Kosciusko, seven months later it comes out in Adelaide. Seven months because, you know, the landscape is flat.

JAMES GLEESON: So slowly, yes.

FRED WILLIAMS: It just moves so slowly, you know, a bit of a tip here and there. So there’s no such thing as a landscape that goes up and down in Australia, it is you know, horizontal.

JAMES GLEESON: Landscape with goose Fred, is it any particular…?

FRED WILLIAMS: It’s the Preston Gorge, just behind the Preston Tech. And it’s remained like that…

JAMES GLEESON: Here, close…

FRED WILLIAMS: …it’s only about five or six miles away yes. And it’s sort of, and the reason it remains like that is the fact that nobody can do anything with it.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a sort of desert land…..?

17 3 October 1978

FRED WILLIAMS: It’s just like a little creek that runs and nobody can build on it or…

JAMES GLEESON: Ah I see.

FRED WILLIAMS: …and so it more or less stays like that.

JAMES GLEESON: This too was painted upside down?

FRED WILLIAMS: All of them were, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s absolutely habitual?

FRED WILLIAMS: Habitual, yes. That one’s an obvious one…

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

FRED WILLIAMS: …because of the shape, yes. Of course it’s not a good photograph by the way. But actually that's a little stronger and so is that. That's one of the few bits of pure colour in the picture, and of course the diagonal is... and that should really be a little darker. See so I have forced the colour round here. The lines come around here. It's a little bit hesitant, plonking the white tree on. Push and pull…

JAMES GLEESON: And then turn it up and it’s right, it works.

FRED WILLIAMS: If it—

JAMES GLEESON: If it works one way…

FRED WILLIAMS: Always with the proviso if it doesn't work when I turn it up the right way, I don't worry, because I know it’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: And you never touch it once you turn it up?

FRED WILLIAMS: I try not to. I couldn’t say, I wouldn’t stake my life on it, but I would say that the better ones I don't touch. The ones I suppose that are less successful I probably do, because the implication being that if you alter it when you put it up the right way, you are sort of making a concession to reality or to the physical object which

JAMES GLEESON: But would that apply to even such a definitely divided landscape between say, earth and sky, as the Mount Kosciusko one.

FRED WILLIAMS: No. You have touched me on a very sore point there. I visited Kosciusko but once, and I was so terribly impressed, the thought immediately occurred to me that here was the one occasion, and after all its fair to say that I’ve never set out to be a scene painter ever.

18 3 October 1978

JAMES GLEESON: No, no.

FRED WILLIAMS: But there comes a moment in your life when the scene requires that you depict it as such, and frankly I was painting a scene. I think the pictures I painted there would work up side down, but the emphasis would be as a scene. I have literally worked as a scene painter there. But frankly so, I literally set out to do that.

JAMES GLEESON: the sky in that painting seemed to me to be so much the major theme.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes. There comes a time when you should do that. And I think that’s…I think that you should be… I think your impulses should be dictated by the way you feel about something. That doesn't happen to me very often by the way.

JAMES GLEESON: No, no. Well rules are only meant to be broken…

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: …when you feel you need to.

FRED WILLIAMS: I must confess I had the slight feelings when I went to Weipa up in the Cape York Peninsula, and it was so overwhelming. But I managed to get on top of that one and I said no. It was back to the drawing board.

JAMES GLEESON: Have you done much on the Weipa field?

FRED WILLIAMS: I did a series of watercolours, I didn't show you those?

JAMES GLEESON: No, I haven’t seen those.

FRED WILLIAMS: Perhaps I should. I think they’re my best series of watercolours but in the sense…

JAMES GLEESON: Gouache or…?

FRED WILLIAMS: Gouache. But I’m not going to try and paint from them. I'm just going to sort of leave them as they are, as a series.

JAMES GLEESON: Well now we come to the last one in our series, the big Yellow Landscape.

FRED WILLIAMS: The big yellow one. Well that’s just me using a flat yellow field making marks. Marks that…

JAMES GLEESON: No particular site?

19 3 October 1978

FRED WILLIAMS: Oh yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Still this gorge?

FRED WILLIAMS: Still the same gorge on the other side. Behind that hill there, there is a tributary of that creek.

JAMES GLEESON: What is it called again?

FRED WILLIAMS: It’s Preston Gorge.

JAMES GLEESON: Preston Gorge.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: So the yellow landscape is a tributary?

FRED WILLIAMS: It has something like forty sketches, which I still own. I have them all. So it was a combination of an awful lot of pictures, and I just simply lined the big canvas up and made some marks on it, which I thought were evocative. Now I must confess that one of the few times in my life I was curious about music too. I wanted to make it a sort of a staccato.

JAMES GLEESON: That comes out very strongly, yes.

FRED WILLIAMS: Push, pull, but still flat and sort of going straight across.

JAMES GLEESON: The staccato is held by the…?

FRED WILLIAMS: But still trying to make the marks as legitimate as I possibly could. I don't know how successful it is but it’s a…

JAMES GLEESON: I think it is a great painting, a really… a stunning work.

FRED WILLIAMS: Is it? Actually it’s interesting. It would be very interesting to sort of show the sketches with that one.

JAMES GLEESON: It would.

FRED WILLIAMS: Yes, because I think I still own them all. I think I've got them all there. I certainly, after I'd painted the thing about, I worked there for about four months. None of the sketches ever meant anything, you know, but I just kept doing them, kept doing them, till finally I painted the big picture but…

JAMES GLEESON: Not with the sketches in front of you?

20 3 October 1978

FRED WILLIAMS: The sketches just are no good, you know. I mean when I say they’re no good I mean they’re…

JAMES GLEESON: You didn’t work from sketches ever?

FRED WILLIAMS: Not really. Not in that sense, no.

JAMES GLEESON: You just paint the feel of the place.

FRED WILLIAMS: Just get it out of your system, and that’s it.

JAMES GLEESON: That covers what we have of yours.

FRED WILLIAMS: All right.

JAMES GLEESON: I do not think there’s any point in going into biographical material because Patrick's book will all have that.

FRED WILLIAMS: Patrick has that, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: And there is no need to go into the works on paper.

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