‘Giant’ of Australian art John Olsen dies, aged 95
John Olsen, one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists who was known for his distinctive depictions of landscapes and nature, has died at age 95.
John Olsen at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney in 2017. Photo: AAP/AGNSW, Mim Stirling
The painter, known for changing the way people viewed the Australian landscape, died on Tuesday evening surrounded by his family.
Born in Newcastle, Olsen’s career spanned more than 60 years, with his work exhibited in galleries across the nation and overseas.
He was a giant who never lost the twinkle in his eye, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in an online statement on Wednesday.
“A man of talent, charisma, generosity and humility, he was a poet of the brush, a truly great explorer and interpreter of the Australian landscape. We were so lucky to have him,” he said.
Olsen won the country’s major art awards across almost 40 years, including the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes.
Along with Indigenous artists, he changed the way people looked at Australia, his son Tim told ABC News Breakfast on Wednesday.
“He wanted to encapsulate that whole overall experience of being in the Australian landscape and he just had this ability to transport you into the vastness of our country,” he said.
He described his father as a raconteur, bon vivant and marvellous cook with an egalitarian sense of humanity, loved by everyone from prime ministers to the local greengrocer.
Among the artist’s acclaimed works is Salute to Five Bells, which hangs in the Sydney Opera House.
A tribute to his long career will be beamed onto the building’s sails next month during the Vivid Sydney festival.
Olsen was able to watch an animation of the Opera House projection in the days before he died, a tribute his son said completed the circle of his father’s life.
“There were tears rolling down his face to see a mock-up of the Opera House with his works merging into each other and how the animators were able to bring his birds and his frogs to life,” Tim Olsen said.
The painter spoke to AAP last year about his affinity with rural and remote Australia, having long captured its wild terrain.
“To be an Australian landscape painter is to be an explorer,” he said after donating several of his works to a regional NSW gallery.
“There is so much to look at and observe about the Australian landscape, how it varies from tropical to the coastal fringe and the interior.
“It’s so multiple. It’s a beautiful animal, that landscape.”
After receiving an Order of Australia in 2001, Olsen described art as a form of compulsion, which he started developing at age four.
“Artists are born, not made,” he said.
Olsen received numerous other awards in his long career, including an OBE in 1977.
He won the Archibald for Self-portrait Janus-Faced in 2005, the Wynne Prize for The Chasing Bird Landscape in 1969 and A Road to Clarendon: Autumn in 1985, and the Sulman Prize for Don Quixote Enters the Inn in 1989.
– AAP
