Terrace Houses - Sydney

What Dad saw, photographed, sketched, and painted in 1969

One of the things we have lamented is that we have little/no work of Dad’s from his successful years as an artist in Australia. We lived there from 1963-1969 and Dad seems to have been not only prolific, but well-respected. He won a slew of art prizes, so many (as my mother used to love to tell anyone who would listen) that he was asked to stop submitting work and start being a judge.

His rising star meant that he was able to sell everything he produced - a dream situation for a young up-and-coming fine artist, but not so great for family members who might have liked to own a piece of his artistic past.

One of my brothers has taken to monitoring Australian art auction sites and recently managed to be the top bidder for this painting titled, Terrace Houses, Sydney. Dated 1969, this must have been one of the last paintings Dad completed and sold before we made the move to Canada’s Rocky mountains in the summer of ‘69.

If there’s anyone from Australia reading this, I would LOVE to see a photo of what this view looks like today (some quick image searching online isn’t turning anything up that looks quite right…).

The painting is interesting for a number of reasons. I love the rhythm and movement he has integrated into the design of the buildings - which are keenly observed and accurate in a loose kind of way. The foreground is completely different to the finely textured grasses and shrubs more typical of his later work. The colour choices echo from grasses to structures to sky. The sky is as understated as the foreground is dynamic and the result is the eye moves from front to back and bottom to top of the painting through a bit of a zig-zag route through strong dark patches and reddish brown building details. In places there are strong linear elements that capture and lead the eye through a landscape that is simultaneously familiar (yes, that must be the reference photo he used) and not (these are suggestions of buildings, not slavish reconstructions).

It would have been lovely to analyze the painting and talk to Dad about his process, the decisions he made in terms of what to include, what to emphasize, and what to omit (all the freedoms he enjoyed as a painter), but alas, the work surfaced too late for that. Instead, my brother and I have become sleuths, looking for breadcrumbs left behind in Dad’s stockpile of reference photos, notebooks, sketchbooks, and loose drawings. How cool, though, to have brought these two images together again after so many years…

If you happen to know of someone who owns one of Dad’s paintings (or who is familiar with the art scene in Australia in the 60s) I would love it if you would point them in the direction of this Substack and/or the E. Colin William Artist Facebook page. I’d love to gather stories about his artwork (and images of paintings) in one place, so if you’d like to help out by spreading the word, please do :)