Lysterfield (1968)

In 1965 Williams started sketching regularly at Lysterfield, which was a short car ride from his home at Upwey, Victoria, where he had moved in 1963. 'The landscape presented a variety of motifs. Its gently undulating country suggested some of the Hillside and Hummock landscapes. Lysterfield contained dense areas of bush as well as cleared country. But it was also a landscape of plains. It brought together many of Williams's principal motifs of the years since 1963 and he treated the Lysterfield landscapes as both a summing up and a new start ... The Lysterfield landscapes represent the completion of one phase of Williams' art where his pictorial language came to full maturity. He refined his method of painting to the point where it was as spontaneous as handwriting. The particularity of the scene fell away and the spare, elementary language of pictorial form emerged with crystal clarity. At the end of the Lysterfield paintings Williams dominated his own art with a supreme confidence.' (P. McCaughey, Fred Williams, 2008, p.184)

The present work, painted in April 1968, is part of the Bushfire series Williams painted in response to the fires that started on 19 February 1968 near Upwey and continued into autumn: 'In 1968 Williams and his family saw the landscape around them drastically transformed by raging bushfires. Even though their house was spared, it was a terrifying experience. The transition from bushfire to burnt landscape to regeneration became the subjects of many striking paintings and gouaches of the period.' (D. Hart, Fred Williams Infinite Horizons, Canberra, 2011)