JOHN OLSEN

The artist
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

This work is framed in a contemporary dark brown box timber frame. The work is in good condition.
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In Olsen's Clarendon landscapes of the early 1980s he synthesises his outback experiences with the broad golden grasslands of country South Australia in generous, generalizing landscape abstractions. In paintings such as the present work, airy voids are separated and strung together and overlaid by dappled forest and scrub, creekbeds and fencelines.

In some ways, Bird in Landscape can be read as a reprise of the earlier Lake Hindmarsh, The Wimmera (1970, private collection). Of that work, Deborah Hart has written: 'Within its vast, open space is the reflection of the sun and the most minute bird. "The reason the bird is tiny", Olsen said, "is that you are tiny in the overwhelming sense of nature and life." He was inspired by the Japanese Sung Dynasty artists whose ideas he had first encountered in his reading of D.T. Suzuki's Zen and Japanese Culture in the late 1950s. In this text, Suzuki relates the ideas of Bayen (Ma Yuan, 1175-1225), one of the greatest southern Sung artists: a simple fishing boat in the midst of the rippling waters is enough to awaken in the mind of the beholder a sense of the vastness of the sea and at the same time of peace and contentment – the Zen sense of the Alone... the incomprehensibility of the Absolute encompassing all the world.'¹

1. Deborah Hart, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1993, p. 104