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Oil canvas Signed and dated 69 lower left
Provenance Private collection, Sydney Exhibited John Olsen '69, White Studio Gallery, Adelaide, November 1969, cat. 7 John Olsen, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 24 October - 8 November 1972, cat. 6 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne (label on the reverse) Reference Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, 1991, p.100, cat. 63, illus. Mallee Country is among Olsen's most beautiful landscapes of the 1960s, the decade in which his work first received widespread critical acclaim and when he also completed the great Five Bells (Art Gallery of New South Wales) and Salute to Cerberus (formerly in the Harold E. Mertz Collection at Austin, Texas). Born in Newcastle and raised in Sydney, Olsen has often been regarded as a 'Sydney painter' because of the extensive periods he has worked in New South Wales. In fact he has produced important bodies of work in many parts of the country, exploring its unique landscape features. During 1969, after travels in Europe, he joined the artists' colony, 'Dunmoochin', established by Clifton Pugh in bushland outside Melbourne. 'Freddie Williams used to come there', Olsen remembers, 'John Perceval was also often around. We were in the landscape, all working together: there are times that are a real artist life - like a Heidelberg School experience' (conversation with the artist). From Dunmoochin, Olsen travelled around Victoria. In visiting the pastoral districts of Victoria he was, probably unconsciously, following in the artistic footsteps of both the Heidelberg School master Arthur Streeton - whose iconic Land of the Golden Fleece, 1925, was completed in the Western District - and perhaps more specifically Sidney Nolan, whose great Wimmera series had created a radical new vision of the Australian landscape in the 1940s. Streeton once observed how 'nature's scheme of colour' through much of Australia is blue and gold. Here, in Mallee Country, Olsen perfectly captures the creamy gold and azure blue of the Victorian wheatlands. One of his favourite locations was Jeparit, a wheat town near Horsham (Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 100). Nolan, too, had painted around Horsham, whilst stationed there with the army in 1942 and 1943. As he wrote to Sunday Reed, he was at first confounded by the seemingly endless flatness and absence of conventional linear perspective but, immersing himself in the landscape, 'it came simply that if you imagined the land going vertically into the sky it would work'. Like Nolan, Olsen has adopted an aerial, bird's-eye view, but his landscape is less schematic and abstracted than Nolan's; far more expansive, and teeming with life and movement in its animistic, calligraphic details. In the words of Deborah Hart, 'Olsen recreates the pale, sandy colouration of the district and explores new, inventive compositional formats... [In] Mallee Country signs of human domestication appear amidst the coalescing grey-green shapes, set against the creamy ground of the open landscape' (ibid.). Mallee Country was included in Olsen's first one-man exhibition in Adelaide in 1969. That same year he had also joined Rudy Komon's 'stable' of leading artists in Sydney, to considerable acclaim, and won the Wynne Prize for Landscape at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He is now arguably Australia's greatest living landscape painter.