You Yangs I 1963

  

oil on composition board 137.0 x 180.3 cm
(Private Collection)

    
      The landscape is seen from a vast aerial perspective here, with trees dotted like animal tracks on the painting surface, forming geometric configurations despite what seems to be a randomness in their positioning. The intuitive, erratic use of drips and splodges of paint creates a landscape which is energetic and animated. A new kind of pictorial space is developed - vast, yet containing and ordering the bushlands within it. In the You Yangs second series (1965-6) Williams further structures an increasingly decorative painting surface by introducing the horizon line as a point of the focus - a motif which was to compositionally bind many of his landscapes to come.    
             

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