Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney

Related works:

Creation Series – Man and the Spheres, 1991, oil on canvas, triptych: 182.5 x 730.5 cm overall, collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Australian Galleries, Melbourne; Private collection, Sydney

Ray Hughes Gallery, 1988 Laverty Collection

Ray Hughes Gallery, Brisbane

The Estate of­­ Ray Hughes

William Robinson began painting his farmyard scenes in the 1980s, after he had moved to rural Brisbane in the 1970s. Having had spent much time in the company of his farm animals Robinson came to uncover their individual humorous, yet whimsical nature in his paintings. Significant to most of his farmyard works and as exemplified in Farmyard are a lack of horizontal lines, a flat background and a sense of surrounding chaos honing in on the personality of the animal subject(s) and their chaotic farm life.

Ray Hughes Gallery

Private collection, Sydney

‘The Private Collection in Brisbane’, Brisbane City Hall, Art Gallery and Museum, June 1 – 30, 1990

Australian Galleries; Private collection, Sydney

William Robinson began painting his farmyard scenes in the 1980s, after he had moved to rural Brisbane in the 1970s. Having spent much time in the company of his farm animals Robinson came to uncover their individual humorous, yet whimsical nature in his paintings.

Australian Galleries; Private collection, Sydney

William Robinson began painting his farmyard scenes in the 1980s, after he had moved to rural Brisbane in the 1970s. Having spent much time in the company of his farm animals Robinson came to uncover their individual humorous, yet whimsical nature in his paintings.

The collection of the artist

Collection of the artist;
Private collection, Queensland

A magical feeling for the spirit of place combines with a grand vision of the ocean and adjacent landscape in this large scale, light-filled work. Here the artist, as expressed in his own words, invites the viewer ‘…to live in the vision itself.’ The Robinsons purchased a retreat near Byron Bay in 2005 and the paintings from this area are both rare and among the artist’s finest.

The beautifully detailed foreground foliage in the present picture demonstrates aptly William Robinson’s exceptional skills as a colourist, and in the rendering of the ocean his ability to capture extraordinary effects with clarity of light.

Of his solo exhibition at the Ray Hughes Gallery in 1994, critic John MacDonald stated ’Robinson is the only non-Aboriginal artist since Fred Williams and John Olsen to give… an entirely new view on the Australian landscape’.

William Robinson is represented widely in public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia; Australian university collections; Parliament House, Canberra; many Australian regional galleries; Artbank; Museum of Brisbane and State Library Queensland; all Australian mainland state collections; and internationally in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Vatican Museum, Vatican City; the Auckland Art Gallery and Waikato Art Museum, Hamilton in New Zealand.