John Olsen
Studio (extract) 2007
John McDonald
John Olsen is used to being treated like a star, but even he was surprised at the reaction when he won the 2005 Archibald prize with his Self-portrait, Janus faced. "I felt impaled by it," he says. "For three months it was impossible to walk the streets of Sydney or Bowral without being congratulated by very nice people. I was always being asked for interviews. And then there was the Archibald lunch, with three hundred guests all waiting to hear what 'Janus faced' meant. I got the trophy, but I won't be entering ever again. Just grab the prize and run is my advice."
One feels that Olsen's exasperation is slightly exaggerated, because he patently enjoys the attention. For most of his career, he has been viewed as one of Australia's great painters and one the art world's liveliest personalities. He has lived in Bowral for eight years, having moved from an even more remote property near Bathurst. While Olsen may prefer the semi-rural lifestyle, he also knows that a return to the city would be ruinous.
"I couldn't work in Sydney," he confesses. "I love Sydney, but both of us are too gregarious, so therefore I just have to be where I am. In Bowral I'm never lonely or desirous of company, but that bitch goddess Sydney has an effect on me - that blue, bloody bitch! And I think, as you get older you've got to attempt to be wise. You've got to understand yourself, you've got to come to terms with your strengths and weaknesses."
Although he has dabbled in many genres Olsen sees himself primarily as a landscape painter. Almost every painting is generated by a place, even his Archibald Prize-winning portrait, which superimposed his own features on a bleak desert landscape.
He has a particular affection for areas such Lake Eyre, the great salt lake that is dry most of the time. He says it makes him think of "Chinese things, like the richness of emptiness." More mundanely, he sees it as "the sink hole of Australia." On his visits he'll accumulate drawings and photographs that he uses as an aide-memoire, but the sense of place he is trying to capture tends to be re-invented in the tranquility of the studio.
Olsen believes that the Australian landscape is best viewed from the air, and is full of praise for the aerial pictures of the Outback that Sidney Nolan made in the late 1940s. His own method is very different to Nolan's, being more abstract, more fluid and incidental. While Nolan's view of the desert has a monumental quality, Olsen's is as personalized as hand-writing.
"When you have the overview from the air, "he says, "you can see nature in process. This is entirely different from that idea of the landscape that has a foreground, a middle distance and background. In my paintings the landscape almost writes itself. I'm very influenced by the landscape, but I need a kind of philosophical steadiness to be able to probe into it."
That steadiness is a recent innovation. There was a time when Olsen had so much energy he painted ceilings in Antipodean echo of Michelangelo, but now he says: "There's a period in your life when you don't have all that joy and all that juice, and you can't really work with the same enthusiasm. I'd love to be Spontaneous Me again, but in the last decade I find that my heart, my sensibility, is more inclined towards the still point of a turning world. Every day you seek to find a way to generate life from the dying embers."