William Robinson

Rainforest and mist in afternoon light 2002

Throughout his well-established artistic career, William Robinson’s stylistic development reflects shifts from one home environment to another. From a small, haphazard suburban farm at Birkdale, to the dense Gold Coast hinterland rainforest, to the beachside town of Kingscliff, Robinson has continued to depict his own ‘backyard’. This monumental rainforest landscape represents the landscape at Beechmont where his studio was situated, depicting it as an entangled, mysterious environment, viewed dramatically from below. Primordial forest forms rise centrally amid accompanying clouds and, while this is clearly an antipodean environment, the work has echoes of the European sublime landscape tradition.

The work is also typical of many of Robinson’s appreciations of the rainforest in its lack of a horizon line. Robinson has painted the forest many times as if looking through the dense canopy or amid the tangled complexity of the forest floor. Fran Cummings has written of the effect this landscape had on Robinson’s perspective:

In stark contrast to their earlier benign surroundings at Birkdale, the Beechmont property was a vast tract of challenging terrain revealed in constantly altered states due to the vagaries of the weather. Suddenly, it was impossible to observe the landscape from a conventional viewpoint. At Beechmont, one was alone. The landscape towered above or disappeared below and one had occasional and surreal glimpses of the sky. It was quintessentially Australian territory, home to dingoes, pademelons, pythons and black cockatoos, yet it was also a landscape of another kind: of ancient trees and prehistoric ferns, of hidden valleys and escarpments and, most significantly, it was a landscape with no horizon.¹

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