However, I refer to these specifically as the raw feelings evoked by the technique used as it was clearly not the intention of Williams to create a picturesque landscape' of Australia. .
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The landscape of the outback' has taken such hold over the popular imagination of Australians, and received such memorial, if differing, pictorial treatments like that of Drysdale and Nolan, that it had become the kind of clichéd subject that Williams tended to avoid. Williams was always conscious of the strong tradition of landscape in Australian art and saw his work as an extension of that tradition in the context of twentieth-century art in general' . While Williams was developing his Australian landscape imagery, other artists were exploring aspects of Australian identity.
Williams employed a more documentary approach to the Australian landscape, which allowed the landscape's own distinct forms and shapes to shine through his works. This is perhaps most evident in Gorge Landscape 1981 through its rejection of chiaroscuro principles and bold planes of colour. His approach removed the idea that the Australian inland landscape was inherently remote, and in its place was a landscape of immediacy - from an unattainable, unearthly landscape to one which can be grasped directly. With that change came change in the emotional tone through which the outback landscape was considered. Williams's Pilbara series portrayed an intimate and renewing world, this being in stark contrast to the hostility, or at least alienation that is exposed in Drysdale's and Nolan's works.
The Pilbara series fulfilled Williams' long search to give colour its full place in his art. Colour was to be allowed a life of its own, Williams wrote on 23 January 1972, I want all the qualities in the present work - but I want them to be read as colour- . Gorge Landscape 1981 is deceptive of the extensive range of hues used in the work as from a distance this 1530mm x 1825mm painting seems to be built upon only raw earthy colours.