Walking on Eyre
Qantas Magazine 10/1/12
Larry Writer
From Lake Eyre to Sydney Harbour the Australian landscape remains a treasured muse for John Olsen, one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists.
When John Olsen first visited Lake Eyre in 1974, he felt he has stumbled into the Garden of Eden. Normally a vast and desolate salt bowl, 15m below sea level in the desert 700km north of Adelaide now it was brimming with water that had seemed down from the overflowing rivers of south-west Queensland, and teeming with fish, birds and insects. The artist exulted in the golden sunsets and vivid wildflowers and at a double rainbow that hung in the widest sky he had ever seen.
“I felt I was on the edge of a void – in a psychological space, a poetic space. Lake Rye is wild, aloof, forbidding, joyous, a miracle and a wonderful place to paint.” He says. Olsen’s abstract watercolours of such intrinsically Australian landscape as Lake Eyre, the Kimberley, Far North Queensland and Sydney Harbour have made him one of the country’s most revered living artists. Even in his 2005 Archibald Prize winning Self Portrait Janus Faced, he presents himself painting in what is, unmistakably, the Australian desert. His great works – Wynne Prize – winners Chasing Bird Landscape and A Road to Clarendon: Autumn, and Golden Summer: Clarendon, his Lake Eyre and You Beaut Country series – could only be of Australia.
When we visit, the 83-year-old is at his rustic home in the NSW Southern Highlands-his airy, light-filled studio a painterly tableau of paint splattered wooden bench, easels, canvases, brushes, watercolours and glorious works in progress.
Open on the bench and filling shelves are books celebrating remote Australia. “Our landscape,” says Olsen pointing to the works that surround us, “Doesn’t confirm; it is untidy and unruly; its like a dog’s hind leg and that appeals to me. I’m a travelling minstrel with paint and brushes and my paintings are like route maps.” His quest, he has said, is to paint “the totality of landscape.”
Edmund Capon, the former Arr Gallery of NSW director, once told Olsen, “we look at the land and see land; you see the teeming life and energy within and beneath.” Olsen doesn’t disagree. “To me the landscape has a soul and is alive. Rivers are like vein, the plains skin, the mountains muscles and sinews.”
Olsen’s landscapes are irreverent tangles of wriggling lines, whirls and dots, loosely brushed, natural light-coloured expanses depicting earth, water, flora and fauna. His use of multiple viewpoints provides his unique “all-at-once” perspective, and he has written of being “in the middle of a buzzing honey pot of images changing and evolving, incorporating what is above and below, inside and outside, the microcosm and macrocosm.”
Indicating a Lake Eyre painting in his living room, Olsen explains that “White taking an aerial view high above my subject, I feel free to change my vantage point and paint a galah; there, you see, from a lateral perspective.” An eagle’s-eye view and a frog’s-eye view simultaneously. “The landscape say’s yes!”
As does the art world. Olsen ‘s works are exhibited in every major Australian gallery and increasingly in galleries around the globe. Said US critic Robert Berlind, “He has given expression to aspirations that permeate much of Australian culture. His acute evocations of local wildlife, Aussie larrikins and the immense, intractable landmass itself constitute an art that is regional, but in no sense provincial.”
I am an explorer, the outback is my studio.” Says Olsen, whose painting expeditions have taken him to Australia’s most far-flung and fascinating locations. “We take watercolours, paper and a few brushes, and we work all day.” In the morning, the self-confessed epicurean plonks marinated meat, carrots, onion, garlic and red wine into the camp over and snuggles it in the campfire embers. “When we return in the evening it’s magnificent. What can be more rejuvenating after a days painting than good food, fine and conversation by a fire, above us the unpolluted night sky with big, bright stars meteors? I understand why saints and sages go to the desert – its riveting silence, its purity.”
As well as Lake Eyre, where he goes when the waters come, Olsen has painted the Kimberley with its incredible orange earth” and the Bungle Bungles: “They’re not rock, but layers of compacted sand. You can see in the gorgeous colours striations how the mountains were formed by the sea.” At Clarendon, in the Adelaide Hills, Olsen captured the “lovely straw-coloured grass in summer” and the vineyards of the Barossa Valley “gave me a sense of life well-lived; the wine, of course, and those make it: hardworking, solid people who love the land.”
In North Queensland he painted spoonbills and brolgas, and began his fascination with frogs. “I saw tree frogs hanging from branches. Their movements are astonishing and they remind me of Double Bay dowagers: the big eyes, the jutting chin, their ‘caw-caw-caw’”.
Olsen exhorts Australian to get out more. “To most of us the outback is a mystery. Unless we leave the cities, we’re limited in our understanding of where we are and who we are. Being assured in the country here you were born gives you a certain stride.”
The outback, he insists, reflects the Australian psyche. Its isolation and hardships form our attitudes and sardonic humour. “I was in a pub and someone said, ‘see that bloke with the wrinkles? His face could hold three days of rain.’ Only in Australia is ‘poor bugger’ a term of endearment. And when we speak, we don’t open our mouths much because the blowies and dust will fly in. Mind you, at Lake Eyre in summer, the blowflies are big enough to through you to the ground.”
Four times married, Olsen was born in Newcastle in 1928 and had his first exhibition in 1955. From 1957 he painted in Europe One returning home in 1960, the scales fell from his eyes. “I had to go away before I could appreciate what we have. I was astounded by the light and stimulated by the colour, energy and raffish larrikinish of humid, sticky, sexy Sydney. The harbour was a beautiful bitch goddess, winking at me.” Bitch goddess? “Well, she is not always on your side and you must make the right prayers and incantations to please her.”
Olsen has portrayed his “goddess” in all her benign and malevolent moods. His Salute to Five Bells, a mural of the Harbour by moonlight inspired by Kenneth Slessor’s poem about his friend Joe Lynch, who toppled from a ferry and drowned, was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House in 1973. “As an artist,” says Olsen, “to contribute to the notion of the magic of Sydney Harbour is a wonderful privilege.”
Thirty seven years after his epiphanic visit to Lake Eyre, Olsen’s love affair with “Australia’s plughole” is still in bloom. “I’m in the centre of Australia by a lake three times the size of Sydney Harbour with seagulls and pelicans. It’s Gaia- mythology’s great mother-receiving the rivers. And there’s the sadness of knowing that all too soon the desert will reassert itself and it will be a salt bowl again.”
Making Lake Eyre even more poignant, and not a little sinister, for Olsen is the death of ABC-TV journalist Paul Lockyer (and colleagues John Bean and Gary Ticehurst) in a helicopter crash there in August. “I was supposed to join Paul, but withdrew at the last minute after my heart bypass” he says. Olsen is now planning his next encounter with his salty muse. Although missing long-lost contemporary’s Drysdale, Williams, Pugh, Dobell, Friend and Olley, life, he says “is fantastic. We’re all here on a short holiday from eternity, so lets enjoy. Every new day gives opportunities to see the beauty around us. I still look at a single cloud in the sky and wonder.”