William Robinson was born in Brisbane, Queensland in 1936. One of Australia’s most quietly celebrated painters, Robinson spent years teaching before the full force of his creative vision found its expression in the rainforest landscapes of south-east Queensland. His home and farm at Beechmont in the Scenic Rim became the emotional and spiritual centre of his art — a place where rainforest, sky, and earth collided in ways that demanded an entirely new pictorial language to describe.
Robinson is best known for his extraordinary curved-earth landscape paintings, in which the conventions of perspective are overturned in favour of something far more immersive and true to lived experience. His celebrated Creation series presents the natural world as a place of simultaneous wonder and upheaval — skies that curve overhead, horizons that tilt and wrap, trees that reach in every direction at once. These compositions drew on his conviction that human beings perceive the world not as a flat plane receding to a vanishing point, but as a spherical, enveloping reality.
His print The Ferns in Sunlight (2000), produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Byron Bay studio, reflects a more intimate register than his large-scale curved-earth paintings — the rainforest interior observed up close, light filtering through fronds and canopy with the particular luminosity that defines his engagement with the natural world. Lithography, with its capacity for rich tonal depth and atmospheric gradation, suited the dense, layered quality of rainforest light beautifully.
Robinson has been the subject of major retrospectives across Australia and his work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and numerous other institutions. He was named Queensland’s Living Treasure in 1999.
William Robinson continues to live and work in south-east Queensland.
