FRED Williams is best known for his 1960s near-abstract landscape paintings, in which he discovered, in the words of one critic, ``a way of making the monotony of the Australian bush seem visually stimulating’’. Those who have experienced a long journey by car or train through rural Australia will immediately recognise Williams’s typical landscapes: he painted the boring bits, the kind of undramatic countryside where endless stretches of dun-coloured plain and repetitive scraggy bush stir little more than restless enquiries of ``how much farther until we get to ...?’’
     Williams’s achievement, though, was to convey the awesome scale and distance of such seemingly uninteresting country. He typically painted a muted background over the whole canvas, in a colour like tan, ochre, silver or grey, then covered it with dense, calligraphic flecks, dots or lines of paint to suggest the forms of trees, fire-blackened logs, or ferns -- with everything viewed as if from the air. Filled with light, air and a sense of openness, these often sparse paintings were absolutely truthful in capturing the silent emptiness of the Australian landscape, yet also had an elegant, reductive beauty that caused ardent admirers like Patrick White to compare them to Chinese screens.
     If Williams (who died in April 1982 at the age of 55) had never painted anything else, these works would be enough to secure his fame. But an exhibition at Brisbane’s Philip Bacon Galleries, `Fred Williams: `in Queensland’ 1971-1978’, is now reminding devotees that there were many other facets to his art; and that, like all great artists, Williams was an individual who even in his late career constantly strived to extend the boundaries of his work.
     The current exhibition includes more than 30 gouache and acrylic paintings on paper of Springbrook in the Gold Coast hinterland and the Glasshouse Mountains, which Williams first visited in 1971, and works made during and after a 1973 trip to Bedarra and Timana Islands, and a visit in 1977 to Weipa. There are also a couple of oils of the Bedarra rainforest, and (rounding out the show which has only a few big canvases) three large and beautiful canvases of Victorian landscape and pond subjects.
     An appealing aspect of this work is that these Queensland subjects are not well-known, though a large number of the works here were first publicly exhibited in Queensland in a 1996 touring exhibition organised by the Gold Coast City Art Gallery.
     These works (and some additional pieces not previously shown before) were all drawn from the Williams’ estate in Melbourne, which is managed by the artist’s widow, Lyn Williams.
     Mrs Williams says that her husband was a very hard-working and organised artist who had kept all his preliminary studies, sketches and drawings, prints and many unexhibited and unsold paintings produced since the late 1950s -- which added up to a large archive of work.
     None of this material was seen until about eight years after the artist’s death, when Mrs Williams was able to establish a new studio with the space needed to catalogue and properly store the art works. She has since devoted much of her time to organising exhibitions, like the current Queensland show, which she hopes will reveal new aspects of her late husband’s work, and give viewers unexpected insights into his working methods.