After mainly working with figures in early paintings and etchings, he began painting landscapes after returning to Melbourne in 1957, which remained the major theme in his art. While learning etching and printing in London, he produced vivid caricatured sketches of contemporary London life. It was during this period that he established his method of reworking the same motif a number of times in a number of mediums and very often over a number of years. As an artist concerned with form over subjectivity, Williams' approach struck a jarring note against the unity of many of his close associates such as
John Brack,
Arthur Boyd and
Charles Blackman, the authors of the famous ‘Antipodean’ manifesto of 1959. Williams' work was excluded from their major exhibition. As heirs to the
expressionist tradition, the Antipodeans lauded a spontaneous, improvised approach to painting and saw the function of art as vested in its expressive potential. They had little time for - and, in fact, denounced - the 'new' art emerging from Europe, the influences which were increasingly informing Williams' development. On his return to Australia, Williams saw the
aesthetic potential of the Australian bush in its inherent plasticity. His interest in finding an aesthetic 'language' with which to express the very un-European Australian
landscape. This was grounded in establishing a pictorial equivalent to the overwhelmingly vast, primarily flat landscape, in which the traditional European relationship of foreground to background breaks down, necessitating a complete re-imagining of
compositional space. In this, Williams looked to the approach taken by
Australian Aboriginal artists. He did this by tilting the landscape up against the
picture plane, so that frequently the only indicator of horizontal recession is the presence of a
horizon line, or where clumps of trees huddle closer together towards the horizon, suggesting recession. Where no horizon is visible, the landscape runs fully parallel to the picture plane, as in the major
You Yangs series of the mid-1960s. Here, calligraphic knots of pigment indicate the presence of single trees against the earth, as if seen from the air (example). Williams' first Australian landscape series was based on the
Nattai River (1957–58). Williams' landscapes recorded the passage of the
Yarra River from its source to its mouth. In 1960, Williams was invited to enter for the
Helena Rubenstein Travelling Art Scholarship, the richest and most prestigious art prize at the time with an award of £1000 plus £300 travel expenses aimed at giving the winner overseas experience. Five paintings were required for his entry and he selected
Landscape with a steep road (1957),
Landscape with a building I (c. 1957–58),
The forest pond (c. 1959–60),
Sherbrooke Forest (1960) and
The St George River (1960). In 1970, Williams produced a group of four large strip format gouache-on-paper paintings called the
West Gate Bridge series showing the half-constructed
West Gate Bridge over the
Yarra River in
Melbourne. A section of the bridge collapsed on 15 October 1970, while it was still under construction, killing thirty-five workers. Williams had planned to paint the length of the river, but his widow, Lyn said he "lost heart in the project" after the accident. In his
Beachscape with bathers Queenscliff I-IV series from 1971, Williams painted from the top of a cliff overlooking the beach during a seaside holiday. Poor weather prevented Williams and his friends from leaving the island when they had intended. In 1976, Williams flew over the Northern Territory at night on his way to an art fair in
Bologna,
Italy. He saw lines of bushfires burning and later that year produced the twelve-sheeted gouache series,
Bushfire in Northern Territory. In February 1979, Williams visited the Lal Lal Falls on the
Moorabool River to the west of Melbourne near
Ballarat and painted the
Lal Lal polyptych, a four panel painting that he regarded as a single work. The successive canvases of the polyptych depict the changes in light on the waterfall and the surrounding landscape. He described the studio painting as "a major effort on my part" and it is regarded as one of the most important works of his career. In the last years of his career, Williams produced more landscape series with strong themes, his last being the
Pilbara series (1979–81), which remained intact as it was acquired by Con-Zinc
Rio Tinto Group, the mining company that had invited him to explore the arid north-west region of Australia. ==Awards==