SIDNEY NOLAN

Sidney Nolan was an inveterate traveller, first within Australia, and later worldwide. In the autumn of 1962 he went to Africa, visiting Kenya, and especially Abyssinia and Harar in homage to Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth French poet he admired so much. He also returned to Australia 'to', as quoted in the press, 'charge my batteries.'¹ In addition to countless other activities and exhibitions, the year was notable for the premier of the Qantas film, Sidney Nolan, directed by Dahl and Geoffrey Collings. Thirty four paintings and eleven drawings, the results of his African journey, were exhibited in the spring of the following year at Marlborough Fine Art, London. In these works Nolan revealed that not only had he a genuine passion for Africa, but he was also a subtle and gifted painter of animals. There were monkeys, gazelles, antelopes, cheetahs, lions, zebras and, of course, elephants - in the landscape, at night, drinking, near a mountain - the largest of the land animals in company with stupendous land forms, a triumph of might and majesty. In Elephant and other paintings in the series, Nolan captures the untamed drama of the African landscape and its animals, portraying, in a poetic vein, the perfect harmony of animal and habitat. Responding to their magnificence, he spoke of the possibility of painting these 'animals and natural camouflage' so disguised that there was 'a total disappearance of the image...' ² He comes close in Elephant in a moment of painterly bravura. Images are blurred and blended through the daring freedom of the application of the paint, and through the reflections of animal, colours and landforms in the water by which the majestic beast stands to drink.

1. Quoted in Rosenthal, T. G., Sidney Nolan, Thames & Hudson, London, 2002, p. 287
2. Ibid, p. 179