Beechmont Hay and Goat Shed c1983

WILLIAM ROBINSON born 1936

Beechmont Hay and Goat Shed c1983

oil on canvas
60.5 x 78.0 cm; 64.0 x 81.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: William Robinson

Provenance:
Acquired from the artist, private collection, Brisbane

Estimate: $80000 - 120000

Result Hammer: $95000

I think one of the hardest things for a painter is to paint real life, to paint real experiences, real sensations that come to you and not sensations that come to you through other people’s art … My farm constructions were my own invention, and a direct response to my state of life and place of living.(1)

In November 1970, William Robinson and his wife Shirley moved from suburban Brisbane to a small farm at Birkdale, on the city’s eastern outskirts. For Robinson, who had been born and raised in Brisbane, farming did not always come naturally: ‘I don’t want to say we knew nothing about farming … but the fact was I couldn’t make a fence, or do anything properly … The animals got out on the road, there were snakes in the chook-house’.(2) Semi-rural life nonetheless had its charms: the Robinsons relished the serenity and natural beauty of their new setting, which allowed ample space for a growing family.  After an initial, ‘disastrous’(3) attempt at horticulture, the Robinsons began to accumulate an assortment of farm animals – chooks, dogs, cows and goats. This eclectic menagerie would provide the inspiration for Robinson’s Farmyard paintings of the 1970s and 80s, a breakthrough series which established his reputation as one of the most accomplished figures in contemporary Australian art.   

The Farmyard series was conceived incrementally, over the best part of a decade.  For much of the 1970s, Robinson’s art had alternated between dreamy seascapes of Moreton Bay and sunlit interiors reminiscent of French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947);(4) Sophie in her Bedroom 1974 (QAGOMA collection, Brisbane) is a typical example. For all the brightness and congeniality of these early works, they were ultimately derivative: as Robinson conceded, ‘they were other artists’ pathways.’(5) 

Robinson’s first farmyard subject appeared in printed form, with a small 1972 engraving titled Chook Pecking. This would be followed a few years later by a group of etchings, including Ducks Landing 1977 and Rooster 1977-78. At the same time, Robinson began to draw and paint portraits of wide-eyed dairy cows, presented in oval formats with a nod to Victorian photo-portraiture. In 1980, when these works were exhibited en masse for the first time at Brisbane’s Ray Hughes Gallery, Robinson experienced a kind of epiphany:

With the cows for the first time I’d created something. 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. So I had this rather silly show of cows, leaving all other things behind and taking a journey into the unknown.(6)

The Farmyard paintings marked a natural progression, as Robinson’s perspective of the farm broadened and shifted. Chickens, cows, ducks and goats would soon coalesce in shambolic displays of colour, pattern and movement. 

Beechmont Hay and Goat Shed is a highly characteristic example of the Farmyard series. The building of the painting’s title is a ramshackle corrugated iron structure, surrounded by a disorderly array of farm animals. In the lower right we see Robinson himself, whose depiction is typically wry and self-deprecating. Clad in a broad yellow hat, Robinson haplessly attempts to summon his errant livestock. The entire canvas is animated by the movement of the animals, which are captured in their manifold poses. One can almost hear the cacophony of bleating, clucking, mooing and quacking, and smell the damp pasture and manure.   

Robinson’s farmyard is a place of constant change, and this is what makes an otherwise mundane subject so fruitful and compelling. The artist was right to disregard proverbial advice against working with animals, since the visual interest of the Farmyard series lies in the sheer unpredictability of goats and cows, chickens and ducks, as they intermingle and move through space. Robinson’s animals present him with pictorial challenges of composition and perspective, which he responds to with remarkable inventiveness. In Beechmont Hay and Goat Shed, the viewer’s gaze is flattened and inverted to present a novel overview of the scene, where each animal is shown at the same scale. There is no focal point here; instead, the eye is encouraged to wander in a continuous arc, from the composition’s lower centre to the upper right. 

At the centre of Robinson’s Farmyard paintings is a paradox: the chaotic appearance of these images belies their careful orchestration. When reviewing Robinson’s first Sydney exhibition of farmyard paintings in 1985, Terence Maloon observed:

Farmer Robinson is always in the thick of it all, but his counterpart, Painter Robinson, is the invisible juggler, the choreographer, who stands outside the picture, co-ordinating and bringing equilibrium to the scattered, waywardly circulating menagerie of forms, colours and graphic rhythms.(7) 

As Maloon implies, the Farmyard series points to the duality inherent in Robinson’s role as both farmer and artist. As a farmer, Robinson must concede his ultimate fallibility in the face of weather, disease, and bovine bloody-mindedness. As an artist, he is an omnipotent observer, with the ability to rearrange and rebalance his subjects at will.  Beechmont Hay and Goat Shed bears testament to the virtuosity of Robinson’s picture making. 

Footnotes

1. William Robinson, quoted in Seear, L. (ed.), Darkness & Light: The Art of William Robinson, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2001, p.69
2. William Robinson, quoted in Baker, C., ‘William Robinson’s Paintings Bamboozled Art Elite, and Are Now Worth a Fortune,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 16 June 2016
3. Hart, D., ‘William Robinson’s Artistic Development: An Intimate & Expansive Journey,’ in Seear, L. (ed.), op. cit., p.32
4. Ibid., p.30
5. Ibid., p.32
6. Ibid.
7. Terence Maloon, quoted in Fern, L., William Robinson, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p.45

Catherine Baxendale

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