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Oil on canvas Signed lower left
Painted in 1975-77 Provenance The Artist's Estate, catalogue number LW831; Mrs Lyn Williams Collection Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne; purchased by Elders IXL Limited, 9 February 1987 Portrait of Australia Collection, Foster's Group Limited Exhibited Portrait of Australia: The Elders IXL Collection, part of national tour, 1987-1988, catalogue supplement Reference Portrait of Australia, Elders IXL Collection, Supplement to the Handbook, 1987, illus. pl. 51 Always deeply conscious of the traditions of Australian landscape painting, Williams was also well aware of international trends in contemporary art. Working from reality, often seeking out landscapes that might seem unexceptional to a casual observer, Williams created an entirely new vision of rich colour, subtle texture and powerful abstracted form. Born in Melbourne, trained as an artist there and in London, he returned to Australia to take his place as one of the greatest Australian painters of his generation. He was among the leading figures in Rudy Komon's celebrated 'stable' of artists. His work is now comprehensively represented in the national and all state art galleries in Australia, as well in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the Tate Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum and British Museum in London. Forked Tree and Kite is the single large-scale canvas in Williams's great 'Kew Billabong' series, a unique studio work summing up much of what is in the plein-air canvases. It is perhaps the most structurally powerful composition in the series and, in the opinion of Mrs Lyn Williams, undoubtedly one of the most important. Often the artist worked on several paintings at a time, and in the case of Forked Tree and Kite came back to the canvas over a period of about two years. His habit was to apply an undercoat; then much of the image in one session, modulating the surface over subsequent days; then to wait for the paint layer to dry before he returned to work on it again. He began to keep a diary of his paintings, partly so that he would have a record of exactly when each was worked on, so as to ensure that the paint was dry enough for him to move to the next stage. These diaries, still in the possession of Lyn Williams, are an extraordinarily valuable source of information about the artist's working methods and his subject matter. Williams was fascinated by the area around Kew Billabong, a quiet painting spot only fifteen minutes from his house in Hawthorn: urban bushland still partly indigenous but also clearly much impacted upon by modern life - most notably at this time the construction of a freeway nearby. He made seven excursions there during 1975, beginning the first work in April that year. 'The Billabong at Kew is so splendid', he wrote on 21 May, 'but on the other hand it is just a rubbish dump of all things'. Forked Tree and Kite includes a worn-out car tyre as well as the abandoned blue and red kite of his title: 'I used a discarded rubber tyre in my painting as a motif (first ever) and I find it a great place to work'.(1) The slender forked tree also appears in his important group of 1975 etchings entitled Yarra Billabong, Kew. In the words of Patrick McCaughey, the billabong at Kew 'answered certain psychological needs at the time - a retreat, a new starting point with some point of departure from previous work, not too difficult or too quickly ambitious in aim, and notably unpicturesque...As he worked at the image, Williams gradually cast away the more descriptive aspects. The pool became less particular, the structure more overt...The billabong itself was a world of self-reflection...The more he worked the series, the more the pool, its banks and saplings became a unity'.(2) Characteristically, Williams totally transformed his apparently unprepossessing subject. Here the surface of the canvas shimmers with colour, quite thickly painted, a mosaic of deliberate marks. The canvas is divided into broad bands of beautiful paint. Trees rise vertically and gracefully from the shallow foreground space and low viewpoint. Light is alternately reflected and absorbed: by shallow water and in the nuanced tones of vegetation and earth. We are most grateful to Mrs Lyn Williams for assistance in cataloguing this work. (1) Quoted in James Mollison, A Singular Vision: the Art of Fred Williams, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, p. 199. (2) Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927-1982, Bay Books, Sydney, rev. edn 1987, pp. 285-286.