JOHN OLSEN

The artist
Private collection, Sydney; acquired from the above in 1982
Australian, International and Contemporary Paintings, Christie's, 23 and 24 August 2004, lot 38
Private collection

John Olsen, Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide, 1982

Good condition. Reverse is sealed. UV inspection reveals no retouching or restoration.
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In August 1982 and again in March of the following year, John Olsen participated in an ambitious cultural geography expedition, which would lead to the book The Land Beyond Time.¹  This project, organised by photographer and gallerist Alex Bortignon and sponsored by Allen Chrstensen took Olsen, writers Mary Durack and Geoffrey Dutton and naturalist Vincent Serventy up to and across the north-west of Western Australia, to encourage and record their various responses to the rich and ancient environment, and to its human and animal inhabitants. 

As with his previous involvement with the ABC television series Wild Australia, and his other landscape immersions from 'Dunmoochin' to Lake Eyre, on the Land Beyond Time trips Olsen produced many drawings of local floral and fauna, particularly the bird life.  Some these would later reappear in larger and more complex oils, painted in the peaceful seclusion of Clarendon, South Australia, where Olsen and his partner Nola Hjorth settled in 1981.  The present work is such a painting.

A fortnight into the initial tour, en route between Woodstock and Port Hedland, the Bortignon party visited Abydos Station, an abandoned pastoral enterprise.  Olsen recorded in his diary: 'The station is situated on a beautiful soak surrounded by palm trees.  As Vin [Serventy] groped through the dense undergrowth, nine Nankin [sic] night herons took to the air, a very rare sight because of the solitary nature of the bird.'¹  It may have been this intense ornithological encounter which prompted the artist to use the bird as the central image of the present work.  It may simply have been that he was charmed by the night heron's curious appearance.  Unlike its taller, more slender, more elegant cousins, the Nankeen or Rufous Night Heron is a stocky bird, its large head, short neck and relatively short legs giving it a slightly odd, even ungainly appearance.  During the breeding season it bears three long white nuptial plumes extending from the back of its head. 

Whatever the motivation, Olsen's use of the night heron in the present work is as some kind of titular deity, a spirit of place.  Richly textured and lightly comic, like a Martin Brothers ceramic, the bird presides regally over a darkling, banded wetland environment.  His head dissolves in a cloud of insect thoughts, his beak softens and stretches out like a pointy finger, while a nuptial plume becomes a flowing ribbon, the line of a hillside, a creek, a twig.

In some of Olsen's landscapes the viewer can find little creatures - owls or frogs or pelicans or fish - hiding in the pictures' corners: camouflaged against the colour field, lost in the internal discrepancies of scale, protected by the distracting abstract screen of spots, blobs and curlicues.  In others, the land forms themselves - lakes and creek beds and hills and estuaries- seem to resolve into animal-body shapes.  Sometimes, as in the present work, there is a bit of both.  Here we can clearly sense the artist's sympathy for Aboriginal cosmology, his belief that the land is not inert, 'but animated by spirits that are alive and vital... that the river was more than a river, a river might have the snake god in it, or a rock might contain the spirit of a kangaroo.'²  Or as he observed on another occasion, 'mere scientific observation or topographical rendering would be quite unsatisfactory if it were not informed by some mythic moving force.'³ 

1. John Olsen (ed.), The Land Beyond Time: A Modern Exploration of Australia's North-West Frontiers, Macmillan, Melbourne and Sydney, 1984
2. John Olsen, Drawn from Life, Duffy and Snelgrove, Sydney, 1997, p. XXX, diary entry for 18 August 1982
3. John Olsen, interview with Deborah Hart, 1997, in Deborah Hart, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 154
John Olsen, in The Land Beyond Time (exhibition catalogue), Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 1984, p. 12