Memories in the Frame
The Daily Telegraph Thursday November 8, 2007, p17.
Elizabeth Fortescue
John Olsen, one of Australia's most formidable landscape painters, is turning 80.
To celebrate, Olsen has returned to this famously restless gaze to 'the blue bitch goddess named Sydney where I spent my childhood'.
Olsen's latest body of work is 11 large canvases in which he revels in memories of his boyhood after 1935, when his family moved from newcastle to the Santa Barbara Flats in Bondi.
The paintings make up the exhibition A Salute to Sydney: John Olsen at Eighty, which goes on show next Tuesday at his son Tim Olsen's gallery in Woollahra. Centre stage is the $750,000 painting Sydney Harbour, Spring Tide, 2007, measuring 2m x 4m.
Another painting Popping Blue Bottles, 2007 - sold for $550,000 before the show even opens - summons up 'the vitality of that blue-violet colour against the yellow of the sand'.
In King Tide at the Icebergs, Olsen brings back the exhilaration of the sea-surge 'spraying over the baths and the swimmers rocking back and forward in the turbulent water'.
Olsen said memories were treasures in a person's life.
'I think these things in our lives are important and universal,'Olsen said.
Other paintings in the show recall swimming at Camp Cove, or 'Campy', and lunching at Doyles.
Olsen turns 80 on January 21 next year, after a life of prodigious travelling, notably to Spain.
'Poetry has meant a lot to me and now is the season to just remember,' Olsen said.
Tim Olsen said the exhibition was poignant because it represented the full cycle 'in an artistic life and in our family life'.
When Tim was a child, he and his father would swim every day at Camp Cove. One freezing day, Olsen said to him: If we can do this every morning together, one day we're going to do something great together.'
'Here
we are today,' Tim Olsen said. 'After 40 years we are doing that great
thing that John might have had a premonition of all those years ago.'