JOHN OLSEN

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Collection of Raymond and Diana Kidd; purchased from the above in February 1972

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, 16 April - 10 May 1969, cat. 1
John Olsen, Reid Gallery, Brisbane, 14 November - 10 December 1971, cat. 1
A Private Collection, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney, April 1992, cat. 88

 

C. McGregor, D. Beal, D. Moore, H. Williamson, In the Making, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1969, p.245 (illus.)

The work is presented in a brown gold timber frame with a biege linen slip. there is some surface dirt on the picture surface and fine mildew consistent with the work's age. Overall good original condition.
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At the end of 1968, John Olsen and his family left, Sydney, and spent the next couple of years on Clifton Pugh's community settlement 'Dunmoochin', outside Melbourne. For the artist this meant a close and constant engagement with the bush landscape, often on excursions with Pugh, Fred Williams and Frank Werther.

In a catalogue note more than a decade previously, Olsen had described his quest to connect, to cross the 'void between oneself and everything outside. The thing which I always endeavour to express is an animistic quality, a certain mystical throbbing through nature.'² Immersion in the Cottlesbridge landscape produced a body of work that clearly expresses this pantheism, this sense of a consciousness within the environment. In Excitable Tree, for example, Olsen projects his own plein-air pleasure onto the vegetable form. The eucalypt trunk becomes a human torso, tickled by the branches and twigs of the surrounding scrub, teased into colourful life by the blotchy dabs and wristy twists of the artist's brush.

Reviewing Olsen's Dunmoochin Summer exhibition³, James Gleeson wrote: 'the essence of the earlier Olsen's lay in their immediacy...Now he has become rather more meditative...The resulting landscapes must be ranked among the most beautiful ever painted in this country.'⁴

1. John Olsen, quoted in Deborah Hart, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1993, p. 93
2. James Gleeson (ed.), Contemporary Australian Paintings: Pacific Loan Exhibition, Orient Line and National Gallery Society of New South Wales, Sydney, 1956
3. The Donemoochin [sic] Summer: John Olsen '69, Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, April 1969
4. The Sun, 24 April 1969