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A Palette and a Plate of Paella
The Sydney Morning Herald, Arts & Entertainment Wednesday 14 November 2007
Louise Schwartzkoff
In a studio that smells of turpentine, on his Southern Highlands property, John Olsen is contemplating a huge, five-panel painting of a plate of paella. At first glance the saffron-flavoured rice dish looks like a golden sun rising on the board, but around the edges of the painting are depictions of chopped parsley, cooked squid and strangled chickens.
“When I am painting this central part, I’m completely absorbed in yellow, but in the last stage of the paella you put peas in. Look here,” says Olsen, and he adds a few daubs in vibrant green.
Could the man often described as Australia’s greatest living painter whip up paella in the kitchen as easily as he paints in the studio? “Can I cook it? I lived in Spain for years. Baby, I can cook it,” he says.
The trick is not to drink too much while mixing the chicken with the seafood and rice. “Because every step is important. All those flavours are getting in and then the rice absorbs all the chicken stock and finally it’s done.”
Though the paintings sell for many thousands of dollars, Olsen seems more confident about the outcome of his cooking than his art. He begins his paintings with abstract patterns, and is often surprised when he later finds identifiable images among the lines and colours. “In the beginning, you don’t know what the end will be,” he says. “it’s like life. You get up every morning, and you can say you’re going to do this, this and this. But you have no idea how it’s going to happen.”
As he nears his 80th birthday in January, which he plans to celebrate “with constant fiestas”, Olsen is still hungry for adventure. He travels in the bush whenever he can, works daily and has recently completed 11 new oil paintings for an exhibition at his son Tim’s gallery in Woollahra.
“People often ask me if I’m still painting,” he says. “What the hell do they mean? What else would I be doing? I certainly wouldn’t be wandering around a golf course.”
His latest body of work, A Salute To Sydney: John Olsen At Eighty, draws on childhood memories of Sydney’s coast. In place of the parched ochres of his desert paintings, Olsen has produced sparkling seascapes in vibrant blues and greens. He boasts they look like the work of a much younger man.
Despite his energy, he has occasional bouts of melancholy. He reels off a list of his dead contemporaries – Rees, Williams, Drysdale, Nolan and Whiteley.
Quoting from his diary he says “At 80, what of my future? The horizon is closer, the ending fuzzy. My past is a large iceberg that will forever be there.”
For several years now he has used a rabbit-headed walking stick. He is no longer able to bend down to his works when they lie flat on the ground, but has designed a lon-handled brush so he can paint standing up. He jumps at the chance to show visitors his invention – a length of dowl with an adjustable head to hold the paintbrush in place.
“You could say I’m in the departure lounge, but that doesn’t stop me being creative,” he says. “I don’t think you should be possessed by your age. Just take each day as a day of possibility.”
In revisiting his boyhood haunts of Bondi, Camp Cove and Sydney Harbour, Olsen has injected new vitality into familiar landscapes.
In Popping Blue Bottles, which has already sold for $550,000, he remembers playing with blue bottles left on the beach by the receding tide. “Look”, he says, pointing at the image in the catalogue. “There we are as kids, popping their bubble heads with our feet. And our parents are saying, ‘Don’t go into the water – you’ll get stung.’ But we do go in and we do get stung.”
From the age of 10, he swam at the Icebergs pool with the Bondi Amateur Swim Club. In King Tide at The Icebergs, he captures the moment “at certain high tides when the water splashes over the edge of the pool and the swimmers rock backwards and forwards.”
He draws upon all his senses to create landscapes drenched in memory and feeling. The painting leaning against his studio wall is more than a stylised pan of yellow rice. “It’s about how this particular event, or these particular colours have infected your sensibility,” he says.
“If your art doesn’t represent your whole life, your not going to make it very far. It’s everything you’re looking at, everything you’re reading, and everything you’re eating.”
A sudden thought strikes him and he leans forward to whisper. “Do you know what I’m going to cook at our family reunion on Friday? Yes! Paella!”