The Modernists
Interpretive signage along the Country theme
The Modernists
“I don’t want to give the impression that I love the bush, and because I love it I want other people to love it. I simply want to paint pictures from it.”
– Fred Williams [1]
Fred Williams, one of Australia’s most recognised landscape artists of the late twentieth century lived at Allawah, St Kild Avenue, Upwey from 1963 to 1969. The property was located in the foothills below the Dandenong Ranges National Park. The hillside towards Tremont became the inspiration for his iconic Upwey series of landscapes with their high horizons and dense treescapes painted in the classic Modernist manner of flat picture planes. His great inspiration was the French artist Cézanne.
In his earlier Sherbrooke series, he painted the giant mountain ash trees, so tall that there is no visible horizon, while in the following You Yangs series he used the aerial mountaintop view to paint the outlook of the plains with the scattering of trees along roads and fence lines.
It was not his aim to paint the scenic views of a region but the essence of the countryside, to focus on its monumentality.
– Lyn Williams AC
[1] J Mollison, ‘Williams, Frederick Ronald (Fred) (1927–1982)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/williams-frederick-ronald-fred-15774