Fred Williams in the You Yangs, Geelong Art Gallery, well worth trip

Fred Williams changed the way we see our environment: his work must be seen within our history of landscape painting.

You Yangs landscape 1963, from Fred Williams in the You Yangs, Geelong Gallery.

This is a fine exhibition that is well worth the trip to Geelong. It is not only a closely focused view of the most important and stylistically defining moment in the art of Fred Williams, but also an opportunity to consider the process that produced and helps to explain the nature of these well-known works. Particularly important, as we shall see, is the dialogue between painting and printmaking.

Williams is often considered the most significant Australian landscape painter since Russell Drysdale, and one who, like the latter, changed the way we see our environment.

These artists, like some of their predecessors, did not merely impose a distinctive shape on the Australian landscape but discerned in it some previously unperceived qualities that were then made visible to us.

As I mentioned some years ago in reviewing the Williams retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria (2011), his work needs to be seen within a history of Australian landscape painting that is not only one of changing styles, but even more fundamentally of changing sites and even of viewing distances within those sites.

Thus early colonial art tends to document the growth of the new colonies, gradually evolving from a documentary recording of Sydney Town, for example, to picturesque views of handsome houses around the harbour. In the high colonial period, the most important art ventures far from settlement to explore wild inland and sublime topographies that evoke the heart of the new land.

These romantically inspired views are characteristically from a distance that allows the grandeur of the scene to be encompassed in the painting. With the painting of Louis Buvelot, inspired by the French Barbizon school and appealing to a new generation in the third quarter of the 19th century, the viewpoint is once again closer and the subjects more intimate and less sublime. The Heidelberg painters who follow Buvelot in the last years of the century avoid the sublime almost entirely, focusing on subjects evoking settlement as well as images of contemporary life in colonies that are on the point of becoming a nation.

Landscape drawing number 3, 1963, from Fred Williams in the You Yangs, Geelong Gallery.

Later, in the years following federation, more late-romantic and symbolist themes, including mythological subjects, appear; before and after the Great War, heroic and nostalgic images of the bush as a symbolic national heartland mingle in the work of Hans Heysen; then in the years after World War II, images of the vacant, all but uninhabitable outback arise as powerful but grim new existential metaphors, expressions of malaise and uncertainty.

In this context, Williams’s landscapes are distinctive in site and in perspective. There is nothing heroic or sublime about his vision, but nor is it one of existential angst. His landscapes do not therefore fall into the category of wilderness, in either its positive or negative associations. And when the subject of landscape is not wilderness, it is usually land transformed in some way by human culture — agrarian or pastoral country, or the domesticated land in the vicinity of urban settlements.

But the more we reflect on the usual categories of landscape, the more elusive Williams proves to be. In the You Yangs he seems to have found precisely the kind of country that spoke to his imagination, and it was out of the encounter with that environment that he developed his characteristic style and language as an artist.

What Williams sees, as it is revealed in the work, is neither intimate and familiar nor wild and sublime, but simply uninhabited, vacant and indifferent to humanity. But even this indifference is not actively hostile, merely noncommittal. It is a kind of affectless natural world, echoed in the dispassionate, detached vision of the artist. That detachment is partly expressed in the distance from which the motifs are seen. Williams’s viewing distance is not so great as to reveal vast extents of land that dwarf the observer, but it is far enough to eliminate any kind of human space.

In most landscapes, either classical or modern, there is some proportion between the dominant elements in the composition, usually trees and geological features, and the actual or implied scale of human beings. Trees, for example, typically frame a composition and either complement or take the place of human figures.

Accordingly, a landscape painter usually devotes some time to drawing and painting trees and understanding their structure and the articulation of their roots, trunks and limbs. But Williams’s viewing distance is so great that individual trees can no longer be expressed in this way; those that appear in his pictures are often small, stunted or burnt, and seen from so far away that they are reduced to graphic squiggles.

You Yangs landscape 1963, from Fred Williams in the You Yangs, Geelong Gallery.

This quality of distance and detachment seems to correspond to the alienation of modern life from the world of nature. Landscapes of past centuries were created at a time when many more people worked in the country and when even city dwellers were far more aware of the cycles of nature and of rural labour. Wil­liams’s pictures, even though based on plein-air studies, reflect the sensibility of a period that was a low point in the modern world’s awareness of nature, in the generation before the rise of the conservation movement.

It is the distance from which we see the countryside as we drive through it in a car, at which trees may indeed be indistinct forms on a faraway hillside. Of course this is not to say that Williams’s work expresses indifference to nature; clearly it is full of energy and curiosity. But whereas earlier landscape artists could be painting a world they understood intimately, and which their own culture knew in its bones, Williams is working in an environment that has become almost unintelligible to his own time.

This is also why his image of Australia was so successful, in the latter part of last century, as a template for seeing our natural environment. His pictures would have been incomprehensible a century earlier, but at a time when we could barely even see nature any longer — and after decades when art had been lost in the desert of abstraction — Williams made it possible and even artistically acceptable to look at Australian nature again.

Cars have more to do with these paintings than may appear at first sight. Of course Williams drove out to his painting sites in the You Yangs; he was not of a particularly athletic disposition. But more significantly, the characteristic verticals and horizontals that give such a subtle but profound sense of classical compositional structure to these paintings have a related origin.

Seen from the height of the hilltops, the dry and scrubby land below is monotonous and featureless, but for the cuts made through it by roads or fences.

These lines are the only sign of human presence in the landscape and they are not, like buildings, instances of actual inhabitation and thus implicit familiarity, but only ­traces of demarcation or transit, of passage through the country on the way to somewhere else.

Williams made something remarkable from this monotonous environment, but much of the work was done in his studio, and in his own artistic imagination, rather than from a closer study of the natural phenomena themselves.

All art represents some kind of balance between these poles: engagement with the outside world and the construction of an artificial aesthetic one, and in this period, with the constraints already mentioned, it is not surprising that the balance is tipped towards the construction of artifice.

Decorative panel, You Yangs number 3 1965—66, from Fred Williams in the You Yangs, Geelong Gallery.

The secret is in Williams’s process and, as the exhibition suggests, particularly in his practice of printmaking, reminding us again that an artist’s imaginative transformation of the world is never a disembodied mental act but inseparable from the actual process of a given craft.

When we look closely at the etchings, small as they are, it is as though we discover a finer, more subtly distilled essence of the vision evident in the best of the paintings. And it reminds us, as already suggested, how much that vision owes to the actual processes of etching and to the limits and constraints of the materials.

Etching is a form of intaglio printmaking, which means that every mark corresponds to a groove or scratch cut into the metal plate.

Such scratches can be made directly into the metal with a burin, in engraving, or a needle in drypoint, and Williams experimented with every variation on the technique, including aquatint, but the fundamental process of etching is to cover a copper or zinc plate with an acid-proof resist, scratch it away with a needle where the image is to be drawn, and allow acid to bite through the exposed parts of the metal.

The finished plate is inked and wiped, and the ink remaining in the grooves prints as the image. But the plate embosses its form into the damp paper in the printing process, and the remaining smear of ink on the plate surface produces the soft unifying background of what is called plate tone. Both the plate mark and the plate tone, as we can see if we look attentively at any print, constitute a kind of internal framing of the image area, surrounded by the white margin of the sheet of paper.

These are particularly important considerations in looking at Williams’s prints, for they have an exquisitely calibrated sensitivity to composition, and composition only exists within a frame. It is here that we can see him playing with the formal motif of the intersecting vertical and horizontal axes, in some cases supplemented and in others replaced by a very high horizon line.

The result is like a minimalist version of the classical landscape in which the geometric architecture of buildings is combined with the organic forms of trees, and this almost abstract formula is then imported into painting, where it is given new body and materiality through the handling of rich but largely monochrome pigments.

Williams’s work in particular reminds us that painting the world is never simply a matter of copying what we see. Learning to render solid forms in two dimensions is itself a complex skill, very far from simply copying. But at the deepest level even this is merely a means to a deeper end, which is to convey the encounter of the mind with a reality that cannot be reduced to objective rendering.

In Williams’s case, as already mentioned, we can see that the emphasis is on the conversion of experience into artificial form. It is almost palpable when we look carefully at any of the etchings, where distant scrubby forests have been reduced to patterns of marks and gestures that have almost entirely metamorphosed into forms arising from the process of etching itself: one can imagine one of these sheets carefully lifted from the press, still damp, the multifarious and ineffable experience of the bush at last fixed as fragile but stable pattern.

Fred Williams in the You Yangs.

Geelong Art Gallery. Until November 5