Title: The dark plane leaves at evening

Author: Gregory O'Brien

In: Sport 21: Spring 1998

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 1998, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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The aerial viewpoint has dominated post-World War II Australian painting to an even greater degree than it has New Zealand painting. The painters Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams were both, at various times, preoccupied with aerial views, having experienced epiphanies while flying over the Australian landscape. Some of Nolan's best earlier drawings are of either Icarus or of an aeroplane crashing in the desert page 36 (an event he actually witnessed while stationed at Wimmera during World War II). In 1949, after flying over the interior, he began painting the unpopulated central Australian landscape. While Nolan's paintings were the first sustained series of Australian aerial landscapes, they were prefigured by Margaret Preston's small masterpiece Flying over the Shoalhaven River (1942) with its flattened space and Aboriginal-inspired pictorial rhythms.

‘The flat canvas became the perfect way of realising the experience of looking down on the landscape from an aerial viewpoint,’ Patrick McCaughey wrote of Fred Williams in 1981. ‘Just as the landscape flattened out below Williams, so he made it do so for the viewer.’⁷ The denuded language of the Australian desertscape, as depicted in particular by Williams, also conveniently echoed, in the late 1950s and early 60s, the pictorial strategies of Post-Painterly Abstraction as embodied by the work of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt.