Deutscher and Hackett

‘I’ve been nearly drowned on the blessed lake when our boat sank in a sudden storm; nearly been sucked under by the quicksand-like treacherous black mud; nearly been blown away by winds that howl in at midnight, buffeting your tent; I’ve had desert sand blow into my eyes, my paint, the camp oven, and ruin my beautiful fish paellas... but all in all, I’ve had a fabulous time there.’¹

Located 700 kilometres north of Adelaide, Lake Eyre first captured Olsen’s imagination in October 1974 when he was invited by the esteemed naturalist, Vince Serventy, to venture to the area which had flooded for only the second time in living memory since white settlement. Known as the ‘Dead Heart’, the arid, salt-encrusted interior of South Australia was suddenly transformed into a teeming inland oasis, ‘a carnival of life’, leaving the artist not only awestruck, but inspired – both visually and conceptually – by the contradictions inherent within such a place – of fullness and emptiness, life and death. As Deborah Hart suggests, ‘Life approached the lake, clinging to its edges; however, the lake itself was a place for contemplation, a vast, engulfing space: The void...’² And Olsen himself elaborated ‘[t]he lake might be viewed symbolically as an unconscious plughole of Australia, a mental landscape, as is the habit of painting and writing. Because it is 13 metres below sea level – and perhaps nowhere in Australia does one have the feeling of such complete emptiness – covered by a bowl of endless sky with inviting silences, there is, as you stand on the edge of the lake, a feeling that you are standing on the edge of the void.’³

Olsen was so profoundly affected by his experience at Lake Eyre that henceforward motifs of ‘the void’ and ‘the edge’ would become central to his way of interpreting the world for decades to come, indelibly influencing his understanding of the intimacy of form and line; ‘...the serene atmosphere and reductive qualities found in many of his works, where the empty spaces are as important as the marks themselves, and to the line probing space, becoming the edge, where things meet, end and begin again.’⁴ Revisiting the fringe-like imagery synonymous with his Lake Eyre paintings of the seventies, The lake’s edge, 2001 features an aerial perspective and striking minimalist sensibility, attesting to Olsen’s interest in the maxim permeating Chinese art and literature of ‘stretching emptiness to its limits’ – a perfect encapsulation of the void as evoking both ‘everything and nothingness.’ Set upon a dramatically tilted picture plane that may be apprehended simultaneously on macro and micro levels, the composition captures Olsen’s characteristic informality through the off-centre placement of the lake – a compositional device likewise evident in such iconic works as Dark void, 1976 (formerly in the collection of the National Australia Bank) and Bathurst butter, 1999, which Olsen gifted to his wife at the time, Katherine Howard, on their tenth wedding anniversary.

Demonstrating Olsen’s brilliance as a master watercolourist, notably this work dates from a decade of unparalleled public and critical acclaim in the artist’s vast oeuvre – marked by the publication of Deborah Hart’s definitive monograph (1991) and his autobiography, Drawn from Life (1997), as well as the landmark retrospective hosted by the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales during 1991 – 92, which cemented his enduring status as one of Australia’s most significant artists.

1. John Olsen, cited in Hawley, J., ‘John Olsen’, Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 1993, p. 134
2. Hart, D, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 135
3. Olsen cited in Olsen, J., and Serventy, V., ‘The Dead Heart Lives’, National Times, 17 – 22 February 1975, p. 31
4. Hart, op. cit., p. 135

VERONICA ANGELATOS