Design and Art Australia Online

Painter who became one of the most loved figures in Queensland art, married Shirley Reas in 1958 and completed his diploma at Central Technical College, Brisbane in 1962, by which time they had already begun their family {of at least two daughters?}. In 1970 they moved from suburban Coorparoo to a farm of eight acres at Birkdale in the Redlands district on the outskirts of Brisbane, where they enlarged the house and initially began growing nut trees – which was a disaster since Bill was teaching art in the city at the same time. In 1971 he travelled to Sydney to see the Pierre Bonnard exhibition – an enduring passion obvious in many works both before and after the visit, notably Interior with Black Dog 1970, Sophie in her Bedroom (both the study, p.c., and the final painting, QAG) 1974 and Interior with a double bed 1974 (pastel and gouache, QAG). By 1975, when he returned from a six-month teaching stint at Toowoomba and the family settled back on the farm, they 'began to collect animals with a vengeance; more and more livestock – dogs, chooks, cows and goats. Shirley was even running a little sort of dairy’ (Hart in Seear, 32).

Goats, cows and chooks 1980 was the 'Judge’s Selection’ in the 1981 Gold Coast Art Prize and acquired for the City Collection, and he had an exhibition of cow paintings at Ray Hughes Gallery that year: 'I felt a sense of amazement that I’d gone out on a limb and created something I couldn’t relate to anybody else’s work before, only to old Victorian photos in oval frames’. He exhibited Myself with Josephine the cow in the 1983 'Perspecta’ at the AGNSW, while the first of several self-portraits sent to the Archibald Prize at the AGNSW was William and Josephine 1983. The later ones were equally bucolic (and comical), including Self portrait with goose feathers 1989.

Even so, Robinson has always been primarily a painter (he is said to have claimed in the 1990s that he had painted every single day since art school) and an art teacher, rather than a farmer. In 1986, when the BA in Visual Arts was introduced at Brisbane College of Advanced Education, Robinson was appointed Head of the Painting Department. Yet when he surprisingly won the Archibald with a mildly satiric 'grand manner’ equestrian self-portrait (Ocker version) in 1987, the newspaper headlines screamed: 'Reluctant farmer wins Archibald’, 'Queensland goat farmer wins prestigious art prize’ and 'Prize for painting taken by goat man’ – a reading doubtless encouraged by Robinson’s maverick Queensland dealer, Ray Hughes. He had Landscape with fire on Mt Tambourine 1987 hung in the Wynne Prize exhibition the same year, while his farmyard scene, In the house yard 1985, was purchased for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – but these professional triumphs were ignored by the press.

Robinson certainly painted many farmyard images, both before and after 1984 he and Shirley moved to a smaller farm at Beechmont, a mountainous eucalypt forest and subtropical rainforest area near Canungra in the Darlington Range, e.g. Farm II 1982 (viewed from above) and Farmyard Construction 1983-84 (which has no single focal point). Four of his paintings were included in the 6th Biennale of Sydney in 1986. By then he was beginning to paint large apocalyptic landscapes, e.g. Dawn 1986 (one of the first of the genre) and the large multi-panelled 'Creation landscape’ series, which includes Creation Night, Beechmont 1988 (Laverty Collection, Sydney), Creation landscape – darkness and light 1988 (five panels, AGWA) and Creation landscape – earth and sea 1995. Giant vertiginous paintings of the natural environment typify his work of the 1990s, e.g. The Rainforest 1990 (Gold Coast City Art Gallery, purchased 1991), for which he did numerous studies, lithographs and drawings (mostly private collections).

Bill and Shirley had a weekender at Kingscliff, a small seaside town in northern NSW not far from Beechmont, where they moved in 1994. They also bought a smaller, more self-sustaining property at nearby Springbrook. Seascapes then become more common, e.g. The sand ziggurat, Kingscliff 1995 (Laverty Collection, Sydney) and Late afternoon, the sea and Mt Warning 1996 (Laverty Collection, Sydney). He won the Archibald for the second time in 1995 with Self portrait with stunned mullet 1994, p.c. (partly based, said the artist, on William Hogarth’s The Shrimp Girl ) and the Wynne Prize in 1996 with Creation Landscape – Earth and Sea 1995. Two Archibald Prizes, as Michael Brand notes (Seear 42), were quite an achievement for an artist who claims to have only ever painted seven portraits – all with himself as the primary subject (and all hung in the Archibald between 1983 and 1995 – in 1996 he announced he would not enter again).

Robinson’s 8.2 metre wide Creation landscape – the ancient trees 1997, included in his solo show at Ray Hughes’s Sydney gallery in 1998, was declared an Australian masterpiece by Giles Auty, who urged the NGA to buy it (it was purchased by a Sydney private collector). John McDonald, however, preferred Dark tide, Bogangar 1994, which had been purchased by the QAG in 1995, describing it as 'a master piece of black, cosmic uncertainty, without parallel in Australian art’. In 1999, when McDonald was (briefly) Head of Australian Art at the NGA, the gallery acquired Springbrook with lifting fog 1998/9, reputedly for something in excess of $250,000.

Writers:

Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn

Date written:

1999

Last updated:

2012