Olinda Landscape 1961

  

oil on composition board 114.0 x 91.0 cm

    
      Williams succeeded in forging links with the Heidelberg School and the Australian landscape tradition, while still incorporating the lessons of his European predecessors, the Cubists. While his early attempts at landscape painting were not always conventionally 'successful', the themes he was later to develop can be seen here in their raw state:
  • a fusion of Modernism with traditional disciplines;
  • the use of a repertoire of motifs that were to surface and resurface in his work;
  • the practice of plein-air painting rather than working in a studio environment;
  • the potential of Australian landscape painting as a vehicle for form, rather than feeling;
  • the desire to capture a sense of the monumentality of the Australian landscape.

Williams desired to produce an aesthetic derived from abstraction - an aesthetic in which motifs are abstractly conceived - without however producing works which were 'purely abstract' in form and intent.
     
    
             

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