William Ferguson

William Ferguson was born in Melbourne, Australia on 4 January 1932. From 1953 – 1981 Ferguson taught art. He was part of the first generation of artists who directly engaged with the Australian landscape via abstraction. He was to combine this with an ongoing concern in his art with sign, symbol and archetype. He was respectful of Indigenous work, in particular that of the central desert, before it became fashionable or mainstream. Since the 1950s, he has visited the central desert and has been described as a translator of Indigenous understandings into western painting. Indigenous dreaming and western dreaming meet in his work.

Ferguson’s paintings attempt to tell the ancient stories of Australia through a series of meandering dots and landscapes. He asks that the viewer take time to be still and reflect – and to ‘walk’ with him in order to explore mythologies of Aboriginal Dreaming. It is his view that, in his paintings, the space gives us the opportunity to open our minds to new possibilities and thoughts. The dreamlike quality and misty colours of his work provide the opportunity for the viewer to pause and contemplate them in silence.

Ferguson paints about story, relationships and deep knowing, in the colours of Australia, and in a manner that invites the viewer to journey to places deep inside.

He has said: ‘By using Aboriginal anthropology and central landscape as subject matter, I attempt to aspire to a kind of communion, a spiritual connectiveness with my work and the spectator’.