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It's an Honour: Australia celebrating Australians
Australian Honours: issue No 15 November 2005
Australia’s light is key to its identity.
This insight has inspired a generation of great artists like John Olsen AO to help Australians discover their sense of place in this vast continent.
Growing up in a depression era Australia, the step from shipping clerk to artist was a bold one, but Olsen had the wisdom of Russell Drysdale and others to guide him. To mature his art, he spent some years in Spain where he developed an enduring love of the Mediterranean culture: “ I still cook a mean Paella”.
Described as arguable the nation’s greatest living artist, John sees himself as a “wandering minstrel…in a strange landscape”. Since his You Beaut Australia series in the 1960’s his canvases have unlocked he Australian light, the swirling diversity of the continent, its landscapes, creatures and folk.
John took a line from a Kenneth Slessor poem as the inspiration for his immense 17-foot work The Salute to Five Bells, which adorns Sydney’s Opera House, making the painting a giant but gentle reproof to the public row over the building.
“I have wide, electric interest. I could have been a writer,” he reflects. But, for John, painting is both his passion and his compulsion. In his late 70’s he spends long hours in his studio and laughs when friends mention retirement. Of his Sydney studio he says: “Every day I am in Central Australia”.
Bringing the light of a continent to the tip of a brush, he says, “It’s not how it looks, but how it feels. In Australia that’s enormous, wonderful.”
John Olsen was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2001 for service to the visual arts as a painter and graphic artist, and in the area of arts administration.