Deutscher and Hackett

The following excerpts are quoted from McCaughey, P., Fred Williams, Bay Books, Sydney, 1980, pp. 15 – 17

Almost everything in Williams’ art derives from direct experience and his sense of form. For over thirty years his working week has contained at least one day spent painting en plein air. Gouache or water colour are his media or, more frequently in the 1970s, oil sketches, and there are occasional drawings. During holidays or visits to specific painting sites, Williams may paint daily for a fortnight or more directly from nature...

Williams’ aim and goal, the strategy of his art, is to realize fully the pictorial form occasioned by the motif in the landscape. His chief efforts as a painter are spent clarifying and elaborating the pictorial structure suggested to him in that direct contact and experience of nature...What Williams does is work at a motif until he becomes so familiar with it, possessing it so intimately that the forms given to him in the landscape become as natural and personal to him as handwriting. The process of his art, its slow period of gestation from initial experience to finished painting, is essentially one of transforming his experience of the landscape into a handwritten code.