William Robinson: Nocturne

One of this country's most widely venerated painters, William Robinson is known for the sprawling, spiritual landscapes which he has been producing since the 1970s. Curated by Vanessa Van Ooyen, the William Robinson Gallery's "Nocturne" emphasises Robinson's engagement with the night sky, as both a pictorial subject and the basis of a painterly philosophy.

In Artist Profile 47, William Robinson told Louise Martin-Chew that his Creation landscapes “started in 1988 and contained both darkness and light. In 1991 our eldest daughter died and in 1992 our youngest daughter died. I became immersed in the landscape in that stage and stayed through seven Creation paintings into the 2000s, one for every day of the week. I didn’t really move away from the landscape after that. I was in a realm where laughter had gone and was replaced by a certain spirituality. That stayed for a long while.” Widely acknowledged as a “religious artist,” Robinson is, evidently, also one who works from and about the family, personal experience, and haptic engagement with his environment. 

The William Robinson Gallery presents, in “Nocturne,” a number of landscape works from this period, which sprawl across their canvases, multiple perspectives spilling and tumbling through the frame. In Out of the dawn, 1987, for example, two human figures placed next to a horse (the animal which notoriously accompanied Robinson in several popular Archibald Prize works) turn their faces outwards to the viewer and upwards toward the surrounding night sky at once. Their shoulders touching, and their faces round and sweet, the figures are at once innocent-looking, faithful, and softly melancholy. Nestled in a the starry sky, and surrounded in the round by pink morning clouds and a dark forest  – somehow, despite the work taking place on flat canvas – the figures are at once set in darkness and the source of light. There is a strong sense of human imbrication within both the spiritual dimensions of Robinson’s faith and within the distinctly local landscapes depicted across his work, including Beechmont to Springbrook, all along the southern coast and hinterlands of Queensland. In this work and across Robinson’s oeuvre, the night sky is that rounded place where darkness and light, as both qualities of the visual world and as aspects of our psychological, emotional, and spiritual lives, intermingle, with each star its own centre. It may just be this wide-roving spiritualism, as well as a commitment to haptic experience, and to matters of the home and heart, which makes Robinson’s landscape works so distinct from the Victorian settler tradition alongside which he is often placed.

At the gallery in Brisbane’s Old Government House, works including Crack of dawn, 1988, Starry night 4, 1978, and Beechmont landscape, early evening, 1985, are shown against rich blue walls; the gallery is itself become a kind of night sky, with the paintings as stars – focal points. The Gallery also offers a more secular approach to Robinson’s spirituality in this show, inviting audiences to use a “meditation room” within the exhibition. A postcard bearing guidelines for meditative practice in the exhibition says to readers that “when you inhale, you are breathing sky. When you exhale your breath becomes sky. Rest quietly in the fact that you are not separate from the landscape.” 

With the Gallery closed for the time being to reduce congestion on the campus of Queensland University of Technology, the space is scheduled to reopen on 8 February 2022. In the meantime, the Gallery’s website provides a virtual tour as well as instructions for meditative practice outside of the gallery space. Perhaps one most fitting engagement during this time of closure would be to take a moment under the night sky itself. 

EXHIBITION
William Robinson: Nocturne
17 September 2021 – 11 September 2022 (reopening 8 February 2022)
William Robinson Gallery, Brisbane