JOHN OLSEN - ARTIST

JOHN OLSEN - ARTIST

I am travelling to Sydney tomorrow (to do a photoshoot - another pregnant person) & I have just missed John Olsen's exhibition called 'Lake Eyre Ruminations on an empty landscape'. However the John Olsen Gallery has images of many of those which were on display. They look amazing (see images above). As I said in my last post, he and Fred Williams are my favourite Australian artists and I'm not alone in thinking that!

John Olsen & Fred Williams are the same vintage - Williams born in 1927 & Olsen born the following year. However Olsen is still very much alive.

These Lake Eyre paints are full of colour and movement. It is not the central Australia which is thought of as being dead. Olsen at the opening reminded people about Burke and Wills and their tragic story. The centre of Australia was not the pastoral lands which the explorers had hoped for. 99% of the time the Lake Eyre District is dry. However it is very much alive now as Olsen's paintings show.

a 1975 painting of Olsens of Lake Eyre looked like this:

His 2004 painting of it liked like this:

Typically it seems as if Olsen is viewing his painting from above - an aerial view. It is an impression of his view of the Australian bush. They are often very bright colours and his view is generally flat two demential. Many of those I like are very much like a child's first paintings of anything - a person or a spider with a central circle and many arms coming out from that centre bit. But on closer examination of these circular paintings there is a lot of interesting detail that tell a story.

The head curator of Australian art at the NSW Art Gallery said of Olsen: "the poet of the brush. He's been brave enough to go out into the interior of Australia and embrace it with love, absorb himself in it like a true poet." In an Olsen you can recognise "the topography" despite "the felicity of his brush".

Olsen has won the Archibald prize (in 2004) amongst many other prestigious prizes.

References:

http://www.timolsengallery.com

http://www.etchinghouse.com.au/pages/artist_details.php?artist_id=31

http://www.etchinghouse.com.au/pages/enlargement_archive.php?artist_id=31&current=32