The Masterly Mr Squiggle
Good Weekend September 2, 2006
Janet Hawley
John Olsen's head, topped by a slanting black beret, peers through the opening of his glistening red front door. “Its car duco,” the artist beams, rubbing the handsome panelled door, delighted with his improvisation.
Australia’s greatest living artist paces slowly on his walking stick in strong, deliberate steps, leading me through his village-style estate in the NSW Southern Highlands. We are heading to his two studios – one for works on paper, the other for oils – shadowed by two great danes the size of small ponies.
At 78, he’s in top form: articulate, philosophical, whimsical, charming; his spirit is riding high. Olsen’s a born artist, a born romantic (he’s had four wives and three children) and a restless lover of nature – always his true muse. He was the Boy Wonder of the arts world, then was “kicked out like an old boot” when Whiteley became the hot new star, only to rise again. He wears his mantle modestly, for he’s only too aware of human frailties. His life, like his famously wandering painterly line, has been a fascinating meander through glorious peaks and despairing valleys.
Olsen still paints daily: it’s as necessary to him as a heartbeat. He starts at 10am after swimming 25 laps in a heated pool. “Gotta keep the body parts fit,” he says. An exercise bike sits in the studio unused. “I decided I’d rather swim than do the Tour de France,” he snorts, stroking the air with large, supple hands.
Those sure hands, which still work as fast as a cartoonist’s, have now drawn and painted many thousands of pictures of the “spare, strange, fickle, freckled” Australian landscape.
Olsen, says Barry Pearce, head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW, is “the king, the one who has defined the continent of his generation better than anyone else”. Drysdale, Nolan, Williams – all gone – were great landscape painters too, “but Olsen is the poet of the brush. He’s been brave enough to go into the desert, the bush, wetlands and embrace it with love; absorb himself in the landscape like a true poet.”
It’s a blessing that Olsen is still going so strong, Pearce adds. “He’s getting better. His last few shows have proved his real genius. A lot of older painters run out of steam and ideas, and get into a formulaic pattern, but that never happens with Olsen. His enthusiasm seems inexhaustible and the world is always fresh to him.”
Olsen has always headed off on regular painting expeditions; sketching, camping, carousing (“less so these days, darling, I’ve given up the late late show”) and cooking his colourful paellas from Lake Eyre to the Kimberley to Cape York.
The most recent foray, with fellow artists David Dridan and Jeffrey Makin, saw him return to “favourite fecund plughole on this old raft” – the spot where the exhausted, silted Murray River drains into the sea.
We reached his works-on-paper studio. It’s the size of a comfortable house. Shelves and tables are piled high with inspirational nourishment – books, poetry, sketchbooks, dairies brimming with his observation from the profound to the absurd, penned with sepia ink in italic script – and bottles of good wine.
Retrieving his Murray sketchbooks, the teacher in Olsen – and he taught a lot in his early years to survive – explains that the Murray finally flows into Lake Alexandrina, South Australia, before emptying into the sea. There, the long barrage that straddles the channel, retaining water for irrigation and keeping salt water out of the lake, provides a dramatic edge. Olsen is fascinated with edges: the pulsing, contrasting activity on the edges of lakes, rivers, deserts, continents.
“On one side of the barrage is the pounding Southern Ocean, while on the other is this great lake whipped up like café latte and teeming with fish and diving, squawking birdlife,” he explains while fingering pages of rapidly drawn sketches. “The sky is thick with thousands of birds, over 250 species… pelicans, cormorants, swans. Sandpipers fly in from Japan, crested terns wing in from Russia, dotterels run along the sand like wind-up toys. Emus – I love emus – prance along.
“Then there’s the Coorong, that long slit of very salty water behind the sandhills, where the overflow is discarded. The contrast is immense, because the Coorong is a forlorn, silent, neglected soul place. There’s nothing there, but the void is compelling because of the contemplative richness of emptiness.”
His paintings from the Murray and Coorong are included in an exhibition of new landscapes at Metro 5 Gallery in Melbourne on September 6. The Coorong trip is also documented in a collection of 13 artists’ expeditions, Unfinished Journey, just published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Some of his paintings are champagne ones – that is, exuberant images like Frog Sounds. “See all the big music dots here, the frogs are going pop pop-op, reebik, reebik, and the ibis is standing there like a schoolmaster about to screech, ‘Shuddup for goodness sake!’” And the Frog Bouillabaisse. “The pelican’s beak is stuffed with frogs – a wonderful bird is a pelican, his bill will hold more than his bell can…” And Bird Food. “It’s a sooty-tern rookery, and the mother is feeding greedy juveniles from her beak.”
Other paintings are his old “red wine” ones, more introspective images of the vast Coorong landscape.
His long interest in Taoism has taught him that emptiness can be as resonant as fullness. “The space in Australian deserts allures me, because it provides a structure to look at a landscape in a different way. Drysdale’s desert pictures are almost like looking at stage machinery, so dramatic and theatrical. Fred Williams is always standing back, with the horizon level slightly up. Nolan is often flying over it.”
Olsen, too, often takes an aerial perspective of the landscape, swooping up and down on it like an inquisitive bird. “But I’m more intimate, juicy and mucking in with the landscape, getting into bed with it full-on… how like me, darling!” he laughs.
Maintaining passion in his relationships has always been as important as maintaining passion in his art. With Olsen, the two are interlinked. The artist has quit marriages three times, taking his materials, books and little else, when the environment no longer let him paint. At 21, he married schoolteacher Mary Flower. Both were young, unformed and penniless and the union didn’t survive. His daughter Jane from that marriage, like all his three children, inherited the creative gene and launched a homewares and decorative design business.
At 33, Olsen married a beautiful art student, Valerie Strong, with whom he had son Tim, now a Sydney Gallery owner, and daughter Louise, who co-founded Dinosaur Designs. (Tim Olsen takes delight in recounting that his father told him he was conceived in the drawing room at the National Art School, during a party to celebrate John’s return from Spain in 1961.) The marriage lasted 17 years and the two remain good friends, regularly swapping books.
In his early 50’s, Olsen married printmaker Noela Hjorth and moved to live in Clarendon in South Australia. Bliss was brief. He wrote in his diary that he felt Noela was becoming increasingly jealous of his talent and success, and wanted him to give up his art for her career. “Why not request I cut my head off?” Olsen left after four years, pausing only to scribble in his diary: “Farewell sweet Noela. I throw a suitcase and a watercolour set into the LandCruiser and drive as fast as I can.”
Aged 60 and lonely, Olen met Katherine Howard, a stylish horsewoman, gardener and cook, and was smitten. His diary notes: “I am in the transit lounge at Hopelessness, ready to rush to gate 19 for the flight to Hope.”
From Olsen's watercolour studio we drive, in his classic 22-year-old, deep-blue Jaguar, along a tree-lined avenue to his oils studio. Thousands of budding daffodils and bluebells poke through the grass under silver-barked birches. The two full-time gardeners tend the roses, the vegetable plot and the rest of the 14-hectare estate. Opposite the pond and tennis court are dressage yards where Katherine rides regularly with her team of 10 Spanish horses.
“Glory be to God for dappled things/For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow/For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim,” Olsen recites, breaking into priest/poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty.
“Australia is a spot-dot place; the Aborigines see it that way, too. It’s not neatly symmetrical, but gloriously untidily asymmetrical, like a dog’s hind leg.”
In a buoyant mood, Olsen continues: “I’m currently in love with the metaphorical imagery in Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize. Especially his poem Oysters. When I discovered that poem. I drove Katherine off to a restaurant, ordered a dozen oysters each, and read her the verse. ‘Our shells clacked on the plates/My tongue was a filling estuary… And philandering sigh of ocean / Millions of them ripped and shucked and sattered…’”
Inside the oils studio the far wall is singing with a lively, five-by-three-metre painting of a tropical lily pond – swirling, dotted and daubed with greens, blues, yellows, red. “I wanted to get stuck into something big,” Olsen explains. “This work is intended to be place as a ceiling, but it could be hung on a wall.”
When he starts a painting he never knows how it will end, “because I want it to be like life, where everything ultimately comes to an end, but we don’t know the journey in between.
He might have a simple rough sketch that he’s made on a painting expedition (he never actually paints in the open, only in his studio). Or a photograph he’ll use as a memory aid; he won’t paint from photographs as they “suffocate the poetry”.
Olsen looks at a blank canvas feels a frisson of slight fear and excitement, tells himself, “It’s now or never, don’t make any excuses, make a mark.” Brush in hand, his style is to spontaneously take the line for a walk. Along the way, he says, he becomes everything he paints – the water, the ibis and the frogs, the jacana bird treading across the lily pads on spindly feet. He gets to know everything as he draws it. “I am in the landscape, and the landscape is in me, that’s the experience that drives the line. Once I get a central rhythm going, it propels itself. I fell a rapport and one thing suggests another, asks a question, sees a connection, just like the poetical form.
“It’s telling me, push me this way, more colour here, do it boy, do it… Make a self-portrait there by that lily leaf, here goes my big chin again. Now water movements here, da-dada-daah, and tadpoles here, dot dot dot dot. And dare I paint another frog… oh yes, I love the animistic qualities of frogs. It’s all about filling space, and leaving space, the yin and yang, to make it work.
“This is not about light striking waterlilies, as Monet painted. I don’t paint love of light, like Rees or Turner. I’m interested in the actions of light, how light reveals, and the actions of water, the ever-shifting actions of nature – it’s a different way of looking.”
It’s also important, he adds, that a painting should be open to sin, where you go against your nature in order to find another part of your nature. The way Picasso put it – “I don’t seek, I find.”
“Now here’s a big sinner I didn’t expect to find in my own picture,” Olsen says, waving a long brush at a Marine Still Life oil. “This started with the weight of a big orange snapper on the left, then calamari playing around, dee dee dee dee, then squid, then octopus, oorump oorump … One day my friend Reg Livermore visited, pointed to the squid in the middle here and said, ‘That squid looks like bin Laden.’ And it does!”
When a painting is going well. He’s elated. When its not, he mutters loud “Shit”s and dark thoughts about his muse. “Sometimes she’s nice to you, then other times she’s an awful bitch goddess. So never get too smart.”
When a painting stumps him, his technique is to turn it to the wall rather than keep it there to worry him into a ball of frustration. It’s the equivalent of a writer putting a putting a manuscript in the bottom drawer.
“Some paintings need a few more months or a few more years to percolate,” he says. “It’s useless to stay up all night for weeks, desperately trying to overwork and perfect something. There’s nothing worse than an over-virtuous lady or an over-virtuous painting.”
Tim Olsen says his father still wonders how he came to be an artist when he came from a family that was not remotely interested in the arts.
He was born in Newcastle, NSW, in a home with no art, no books, no poetry. “But it was a kindly home,” Olsen says. “My mother was a stay-at-home mum, my father a buyer in a clothing store.”
The family moved to a flat in Bondi when he was five, during the Depression. At 10, Olsen saw his father enlist to fight in World War II.
“Dad was 37, too old to go to war. He served in Crete, Greece, Egypt, Syria, the Kokoda Trail, and returned devastated. He was given shock treatment, barbaric in those days, and ended up a tragic alcoholic.”
From the time he could hold a pencil, young John drew incessantly, cartoon-style. It was what he liked doing best. He’d never been inside an art gallery till 16, and at 17 he enrolled in art school and took a part-time cleaning job.
“It shocked my family as something irresponsible,” Olsen recalls. “My mother said, ‘What will the neighbours say – there’s no money in art.’ My father took me aside, saying, ‘I know you’re not one son, but your going to be mixing with some very funny people.’”
Arriving at the Julian Ashton Art School, Olsen at last felt he’d met kindred souls. “I’d found the right warp and weft for my life, a structure I could relate to.”
“I believe that artists are born with a gift, but it’s a big mistake to think that talent alone is it. Art school helps you develop your vocabulary, but you must continue learning all your life. Never stop tilling the garden.”
A businessman and arts parton, Robert Shaw, gave Olsen a four-year scholarship to travel overseas. And at 28 he left for Europe, settling in Spain, entranced by the Mediterranean lifestyle. “I learned so much, it changed my attitude towards life. Before that I knew nothing about great pictures, how people really lived, about food, wine, cooking.”
Olsen became an enthusiastic cook. Over a risotto lunch in his comfortable and superbly equipped kitchen, Olsen again expresses his passion for poetry, honed during his friendship with Robert Graves in Majorca.
“Poetry is like an illness with me, I have poetry books in every room in the house, “ he admits, reaching for a stack at the end of his kitchen table. Ted Hughes, Whitman, Auden, Yeats, Shakespeare’s sonnets, Heaney. “ I believe most people are frightened of poetry simply because hey don’t know how to read it. A poem is like a painting; you need to keep it open in a place you are often passing by so you can look at it, think about it, let it inculcate you with its own sense of poetic form.”
Pearce, who’s had many conversations with Olsen about poetry, says it’s not as though poetic metaphors are actually translated into his paintings. “They simply help him stay alive to the world … and keep singing his song.”
After lunch, the artist leads a leisurely stroll to look at paintings in his house and private gallery. He’s finally pain-free after a knee operation four years ago, and has lost the weight he put on during “six months of post-operative torture”.
Self Portrait Janus Faced, his sombre, introspective 2005 Archibald Prize winner, hangs by a doorway, “so I can keep looking at it and decide what it really means”. Janus is the Roman god of entrances and exits, often depicted with fused heads facing both backwards and forwards.
“You’ve got to reach a certain age before you can paint a picture like this, looking both to the past and the future,” he reflects. “At my age, you have a helluva lot to think about.”
The self-portrait is one of his very dark-toned paintings, which he occasionally likes to investigate, showing his regard for classical discipline. “ But Australians don’t like dark paintings. Rembrandt and Goya would have died of starvation in this sunburnt country.”
Through a courtyard is his private gallery, built in the manner of a two story stable with light shining through tall, 18th-century Scottish stained-glass window he bought from a demolished mansion in St Kilda 30 years ago.
Inside the gallery are works by Olsen and friends – Storrier, Nolan, Senbergs, Perceval, Picasso and tribute works by Olsen to Matisse and Whiteley. “Dear Brett got bats in his Belfry … so careless with his beautiful talent, and is life, “ Olsen says with sad fondness.
“Remember our dough trip in Queensland?” he asks, approaching a portrait of a furrow-faced man. “Here’s the man we met in the pub at Dingo. The locals reckoned his face could hold three day’s rain.”
I do remember. In 1993 we spent two weeks exploring the parched land – he sketching, me writing about it. Olsen saw the ravaged landscape as “like drawing across an empty red dinner plate”. He’d talk about his impression of the landscape assuming the form of a giant-footed animal, taking back the land, expelling the farmers who’d tried to settle it.
Later, back in the watercolour studio, two pampered cats have claimed the antique Chinese opium bed beside the fire, where Olsen usually takes his after-lunch siesta. He puts more logs on the embers, finds a chair and talks of the “beloved” Australian landscape to which he’s devoted so much of his time.
He was 32 and just returned form Europe when he first found this passion. Around the same time he struck up lifelong friendships with the naturalist Vincent Serventy and wildlife documentary makers Robert Raymond and Ken Taylor. “All were greatest reservoirs of knowledge, and as I roamed the country with them I learned more, and I looked more. I began to see nature as a sense of process, rather than a phenomenon. Nature became my muse, my dictionary.