Robert Fisher - The Painter-Man of William Creek, Outback South Australia

As ‘the Painter Man of William Creek’, Robert Fisher is celebrated there, in Outback style, -one of his paintings is displayed on the ceiling of the bar in the William Creek Hotel.

Over a hundred years ago this Pub was a provendoring stop-over for the Afghan working teams which, with their camels and ability to cope with the harsh environment, were imported to South Australia to construct the Adelaide to Alice Springs rail-link, ever since known as “the Ghan”.

Fisher’s studio is at Trevor Wright’s place, and “Wrightsair” is the William Creek based tourist operation which, during the last seven years, has flown this adventurous modern artist on his wide-ranging and movie-recording search over these most ancient Australian outback lands, for subjects to feature in his paintings.

Over the millennia, Nature’s elemental energies have stormed, worn, torn and crumpled the crust of our aged planet, and here in Australia’s centre  has exposed the world’s oldest land mass.

The hugely dynamic sweep and swirl of mountain ranges, the stretched flat plains between, and the snake-like convolutions of the rivers, have been traversed and recorded by Robert Fisher during all seasons, in ‘the Dry’ and in ‘the Wet’.

This deeply weathered land-face inspires and inspirits Robert’s powerful paintings, and their poetic imagery also reveals the artists particular personal and passionate response to the sense of space, and richness of place in this environmentally heroic outback.

His works have included the mystical Ayer’s Rock (Uluru), the tumbled Olgas (Kata Tjuta) and the vast salt-surfaced spread of Lake Eyre.

Australians respect the land-forming legends of our Aboriginal peoples and their Ancestral Beings, as told in the lore and laws of Tjukurpa, the Aboriginal mythology.

Fisher’s evocative and sensitive works are an aesthetic response to the shaping forces of Nature and to sense of place, sympathetic with that which finds spiritual association and expression in the Aboriginal legends.

In his “Lightning Strike” series Fisher remarkably depicts the mood and majesty of sky-scapes, capturing the sudden electrical illumination of the land in a powerful storm.

After a lightning-lit, thundering outback deluge, the next night’s moon can loom brilliantly large in the clear blue-black space about it, and Fisher’s spatially surrealist “Lunar Landscapes” are among his most compelling works.

A remarkable feature of the southern outback and a particular focus of interest for Robert Fisher is Lake Eyre.

The Lake is an enormous central sink to which eventually drain the far north-eastern rivers, swollen and bank-bursting from the annual “Big Wet”.  Thus briefly watered, at times to three quarters full, the lake soon dries to a vast salt-surfaced sun-reflecting blaze of white.

During October last, Fisher flew Lake Eyre by day and by night, storing impressions to depict in works expressly for the New York show,  held in February 2003, the works were vibrant depictions of the salt lake and its spatial skyscapes, of sudden violent rain storms, and of moon-silvered nightscapes.

Few painters attempt such nocturnes, but the moon has a magical presence in Fisher’s repertoire, dramatically captured in a series recording Australia’s historic 2002 outback Solar Eclipse.

In a series of sparse, darkly elegant portrayals, Fisher shows that for a fleeting second the moon is a purple-black disc, suspended between sun and dim-lit Earth, the Sun’s violent fires seen as a flashing halo about the moon-disk’s edge.

Earlier this year, a team of geologists visited the precincts of Lake Eyre, investigating the evolutionary development of the ancient lands formation.

Despite a rib-breaking incident the day before, our strapped-together artist accompanied the geologist team on a 700km 5 day truck trek, over rattlingly rough terrain – and later pictorially told the tale of the trip.

At a distance from the Lake Eyre’s edge, and seen from on high, are the fuselage remains of a very evidently unsuccessful low flying aeroplane adventure of many years ago, and Robert’s depiction of this unusual episode can be seen in his works.  A sombre sculpture, the bent and broken blades of the planes propeller sit in the William Creek Hotel garden, signalling the abrupt end to the aerial escapade.

Robert Fisher paints his individual Australian story in a very personal way, he shows that he is deeply moved by Nature’s many outback moods, and that he responds to the seasonal symphonies of light, colour and sound, he says “I want my work to show how much I see and how strongly in tune I feel with this ancient and outstanding land.”

Don Hendry Fulton L.F.R.A.I.A.*

*Fulton is an Australian architect who has planned the outback Australian mining townships of Mary Kathleen and Weipa; he has a master’s Degree in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley USA, and is a member of Lambda Alpha International.