JOHN OLSEN

John Olsen at Metro 5 2003, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 30 April - 18 May 2003, illus. p. 19 
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

Jeff Makin, 'Introduction', John Olsen at Metro 5 2003 (exh. cat.), Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 2003, p. 8

Timber and gold leaf box frame. The work is in good condition.
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The later works of John Olsen have been described as '...some of the most enigmatic and lyrical works in the history of landscape painting in Australia.  In the large paintings of the void there is often a brooding melancholy, and a deep sense of reserve that is completely in contrast to his early more colourful work.  Spatially, he creates a silence, a very strange emptiness, into which he brings abstract symbols of Nature's forces.'¹ 
Following another return to his beloved Lake Eyre in 2001, and an associated body of work, the William Creek pictures,² Olsen's focus returned to still life, pond life and the sea, including, as here, the New South Wales lower south coast.  Yet in the present work, too, Olsen explores a void every bit as vast and powerful as that of the Central Australian desert.  Here he describes a curved wedge of littoral darkness, a bold whale-head form hollowed by the curves of inlets, rock pools and waves and edged with his characteristic 'sprawling graffiti of busy line'³, suggestions of spits and sandbars, kelp and eels, driftwood and shells.  In contrast to Broome's golden sands, here Olsen deftly 'captures a sea prone to southerly gales, cold and malevolent.'⁴

1. Sandra McGrath, 'A Remote Eden', Art and Australia, vol.14, no. 8, 1976, p. 150
2. See Ken McGregor, William Creek and Beyond, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002.  There was also a series of ten pictures made for the Deague Family Art Foundation, Melbourne.
3. Elizabeth Cross, Introduction, Pulse: Paintings by John Olsen 1961 - 2005 (exh. cat.), Tarra Warra Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2005, p. 20
4. Jeff Makin, 'Introduction', John Olsen at Metro 5 2003 (exh. cat.), Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 2003, p. 8