Australian printmaking

Reginald Wilfred Whiting (Bill) Rowed (28 August 1916 - 10 June 1990) was an official Australian Second World War artist and printed textiles lecturer who taught at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) from 1948 to 1976. He was also a well-known painter of the Australian high country, especially as a watercolourist, an avid skier and raconteur.

La Trobe Journal, No. 95 March 2015

First para: "‘Australian interest in fine printing, letterpress or offset, has always been delicate,’ said Geoffrey Farmer in 1999. This is still true today, when there is far more international interest in Australian output than there is within the country itself. Australia has always had distinct waves of fine press and book art activity that surge and recede, connected to groups of people and similar waves of educational and technical opportunities. One such surge was around the early 1970s, when printing technology drastically transformed (yet again) and letterpress was easily and cheaply come by; with it came a solid wave of activity that then seemed to crash and break in the mid to late 1990s. It is important, for the purposes of this paper, to separate ‘fine printing’ from ‘letterpress usage’, because in the space between the late 1990s to now, there has been more than a millennial turn."

The moment of creative transition for Fred Williams is signalled by a painting he completed after he had been in London nearly four years. Tree Loppers, a large oil of 1955, marks that step where the promising youngster metamorphoses into a mature artist.