Fred Williams, the Void Filled

One

A very wide horizontal surface.

The height is short.

The color is a yellow-brown.
A dry color with gray in it.

Nearly the whole surface is one color.

On it there are dots.

Small dots, short strokes.
Black ones and dark green.

They are trees.

But they do not look like trees.
There is no trunk and no branch.

One dot is one tree.

The dots are scattered evenly.

There are places where they gather and places where they thin.
But there is no rule.

Look for the horizon.

There is none.

At the very top of the surface there is a thin band.
That may be sky.

Sometimes there is none.

Without sky, above and below disappear.

Is this surface a landscape seen from in front or ground seen from above.

It cannot be settled.

It may be both.

Come close and the surface is thin.

The paint is not thick.
There are many places rubbed.

Only the dots are a little thick.

The dots were set by pressing the brush.

From far off the dots look like rhythm.
Close up each dot differs from the next.

No two dots are the same.

Two

Fred Williams was born in 1927 in Australia.

In Melbourne.

He learned painting there.

In 1952 he went to London.

He stayed about four years.

In the museums he saw the paintings of Europe.
He saw the long tradition of landscape.

And he came back.

Coming back, he ran into a problem.

The method he had learned in Europe could not paint the ground of Australia.

European landscape has a focus.

There is a church tower or a large tree or a road.
There is somewhere for the eye to go.

And there is a vanishing point.

The road narrows as it goes away.
Depth is made with that.

In the Australian bush there is none of this.

No large tree, no road, no tower.

Wherever one looks it is similar.

Look ahead, the same. Look behind, the same.

It is a land without focus.

He did not see this as a lack.

He saw it as a character.

So he decided to paint a surface without focus.

He painted the low hills near Melbourne for several years.

He went to the same place many times.

Later he went to the mining country in the west.

It was red ground.
Soil with much iron.

The surfaces painted there differ in color.
Redder and hotter.

He died in 1982.

He did not live long.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

On the empty ground of Australia the void is not sky but ground.

This is the particular place of this chapter.

Bada Shanren, in the last chapter, emptied paper.
He did not set the brush down.

Williams did not empty.

He painted the whole surface.
He painted yellow-brown to the edges.

And it looks empty.

It is filled and it is empty.

Why.

Because it was filled with the same thing.

A width with nothing else mixed into it looks empty.

The sea is so and the desert is so.
Full of water and looking empty; full of sand and looking empty.

The void is not absence but sameness.

This finding is needed in this part.

There are two ways to make a void.

Erasing and repeating.

Three things follow.

First, having no focus becomes form.

On a surface with a focus the eye has a destination.

It sees the focus first and then the surroundings.

On a surface without a focus the eye wanders.

Where to look first is not settled.

Then the order of looking differs from person to person.

The surface is not read one way.

What happens when one loses the way in that land happens inside the surface.

Second, dots become rhythm.

One dot is one tree.

But a hundred dots are not a hundred trees.

They are rhythm.

From far off the dots arrange themselves like music.

Close up they become trees again.

Different things are seen at two distances.

This resembles Sesshū in the last part.

Sesshū's hurried line also did not declare its identity.

What does not declare its identity becomes something else.

Third, remove the horizon and the surface becomes ground.

With a horizon we look while standing.

The ground is below and the sky is above.
We stand between them.

Remove the horizon and that relation disappears.

The ground is no longer in front of us but as if beneath us.

It becomes an eye that looks down.

The interior of Australia is in fact often seen from a plane.

Wide country cannot be seen on foot.

So the eye that looks from above is the eye of that land.

One thing must be added here.

The interior of Australia is old ground.

The mountains have been worn down and the soil is thin.
Nothing has newly risen.

Ground without high and low is old ground.

On old ground events do not happen.
They have all happened already.

So there is nothing dramatic on that surface.

Having nothing dramatic is the character of that land.

And to paint it it has to be painted undramatically.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

First look at what is alike.

Both lands are empty.

There are no large trees in the Australian bush.
Large trees are rare in the fields of Jeju as well.

Both surfaces are a dry color.

Yellow-brown and the color of dried grass.

That both are colors hard to name is also the same.

There is a second likeness.

Both learned outside and came back.

Williams spent four years in London and returned.
Byun Shi-Ji grew up in Osaka and returned by way of Seoul.

Both ran into a problem after returning.

The method they had learned did not fit that land.

And both changed the method.

In the last part we saw that Sesshū did the same.

The path of learning outside and coming back inside appears several times in this book.

This will not be a coincidence.

One who grew up only in that land does not know its strangeness.
One who has seen the outside must return for the strangeness to be visible.

Now look at the difference.

The largest difference is the horizon.

Williams removed the horizon.

Byun Shi-Ji kept it.

Not kept it, but made it the master.

The longest line on his surface is usually the horizon.

Why the reverse.

Because of the sea.

The empty ground of a continent has no end.

Walk and the same thing keeps coming.
There is no telling where it ends.

With no end, the horizon is an arbitrary place.
It can be erased.

The empty ground of an island has an end.

Walk and the sea appears.
It always appears.

With an end, that end becomes the master of the surface.

It cannot be erased.

So the painter of a continent erases the horizon and the painter of an island raises it.

There is a second difference.

There are no people on Williams's surface.

The dots are trees and the trees are many.

There are people on Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

One old man.

That they are small is the same.

On both surfaces the figure or the thing is small.

But the smallness of many and the smallness of one are not the same.

When many are small it is a crowd.
When one is small it is loneliness.

A hundred dots endure one another.
One old man endures alone.

There is a third difference.

Williams's eye is above.

It looks down.

Byun Shi-Ji's eye is at the side.

It looks across.

The eye that looks down does not see people well.
They become too small.

The eye that looks across sees people.

Where the height is set decides what will be seen.

Five

I am standing before a wide surface.

Yellow-brown runs to the edges.
Dots are scattered.

I do not know where to look.

So I look a long time.

On the surface of a distant island there is a horizon.

I know where to look.
I look at that line.

And then at the small boat above it.

One gives no place to go and the other gives a place to go.

Both surfaces are empty.

One is empty because it has no end and one is empty because it has one.