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Oil on canvas Signed and dated 86 lower right; inscribed with title on the reverse
Provenance Australian Galleries, Melbourne (label on the reverse) Private collection Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 1996 Wilbow Corporation Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne (label on the reverse); purchased by Foster's Brewing Group, July 1999 Exihibited The Jack Manton Prize 1987: recent works by fourteen Australian artists, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, February-March 1987 (label on the reverse) Contemporary Australian Art, Saitama Art Gallery, Japan, October-December 1987, cat. 34, illus. Selected Paintings 1900-1999The Encyclopaedia of Australian Art Exhibited John Olsen is arguably Australia's greatest living landscape painter. Born in Sydney, he exhibited successfully there and in Melbourne during the 1950s and, in the words of leading critic Alan McCulloch, in 1961 introduced 'to the vocabulary of Australian art a new title, You Beaut Country'.(1) Subsequent experience in Europe gave his work a new sophistication and panache. In his paintings a highly original artistic vision is fused with both wit and a deep respect for the Australian environment. Many of Olsen's major paintings from the 1980s embody his understanding of the landscape as 'a living, pulsing organism suggestive of animalistic shapes and biological forms; of landscape not as a static factor but as process, not only seen but felt(2). In 1981 he had moved to small town of Clarendon in South Australia, about 30 km from Adelaide, and during his seven years there he explored further along the coast as well as into the hinterland: to the Flerieu Peninsula, and Goolwa on Lake Alexandrina where the Murray River meets the sea. He also travelled to north Western Australia during 1982 and Spain in 1985. Deborah Hart points out that Olsen had first visited Goolwa in 1977, to teach art classes there, but between 1982 and 1987 he explorer the region around the Murray much more closely. As well as the rapid sketches made during his journeys. he sometimes made drawings from the air, combining this raw material back in his studio into oil paintings such as Flooded River & Wattles. This dramatic and highly inventive composition presents a map-like bird's-eye-view of the river, cutting its swathe down through the earth-red plain. The floodwaters glint softly with reflected light. The riverbanks overflow with vibrant, blossoming, buzzing wattles. The very air seems alive with pollen and smalll insects and the warmth of the Australian sun. As Olsen himself explained to Deborah Hart in 1985, 'One thing that really strikes you in the environments I was working in is the abundance and generosity of life and life forces. The urge for life is a staggering thing and we just ought to take notice.(3)' (2) Deborah Hart, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 2000, p. 153. (3) Quoted op, cit., p. 123; and see p. 152.