SIDNEY NOLAN

Sidney Nolan's mastery of the Australian panorama began with his Wimmera paintings and grew through the Central Australia series, enriched by world wanderings to Antarctica, Africa and especially China. The early eighties found him in the far north west of Australia, at Broome and the iron ore rich Pilbara with its majestic mountains and gorges. Fred Williams had only recently completed his own Pilbara series.

Nolan's Rainbow over Pilbara captures all the grandeur and drama of the scene through its vibrant light and pulsating colour, a lunar landscape of dreaming. The use of the spray can enabled Nolan to work very rapidly, giving the painting a feeling of immediacy, allowing wet colours to blend and work together with a facility not achieved previously. Nolan used a similar technique for other paintings of the time including the two Chinese landscapes painted for the Hong Kong Land Group building. There is also a contemplative Chinese flavour in the Pilbara and other Australian landscapes painted by Nolan in the early eighties, providing an inner balance to the brilliantly impulsive handling that characterises so much of his work. This extends into the rainbow, which acts a metaphor of the natural riches of colour and mineral wealth found in the landscape. It also embraces a dual role as the ancient Christian symbol of reconciliation and, from Greek mythology, the means whereby messages were conveyed from the gods to mortals. The awesome beauty of the landscape inspired such thoughts. The following year at Cooper's Creek, Nolan said of the overwhelming nature of the Central Australian landscape: 'But nothing has changed out there in a million years'. ¹ The same can be said of the Pilbara.

1. Sidney Nolan, interview with Keith Dunstan, The Sun, Melbourne, 3 November 1984, quoted in Clark, J., Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and legends, ICCA and Cambridge University Press, Sydney, 1987, p.169.