‘I am in the landscape, and the landscape is in me, that’s the experience that drives the line. Once I get a central rhythm going, it propels itself. I feel a rapport and one thing suggests another, asks a question, sees a connection just like a poetical form. It’s telling me, push me this way, more colour here… it’s all about filling space, and leaving space, the yin and yang, to make it work.’¹

In March 1990, John Olsen and his wife Katherine moved to Chapel House at Rydal, near Bathurst in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales where, beyond the quaint town with its population of only eighty people, the artist discovered an abundance of native flora and fauna amid rolling hills, sweeping valleys and teeming waterways. Often painting en plein air during this period, Olsen gleaned enormous inspiration and comfort from this environment, lyrically expressed in both his paintings and written recollections of the region in all its moods: ‘…Mists foretelling Autumn are curling down from Mount Lambie, a touch of gold is in the willows. Ash trees are bright red. No significant rain since late October, the grass is cackling straw.’² And elsewhere, ‘…The landscape rolls with rounded hills – the trees entwine and chatter with each other, pausing only to take note of a large galah.’³

With its raw beauty, distinctive, playful brushstrokes and mellow, earthy palette of ochre, terracotta and olive hues, Fish River, Bathurst, 1999 offers a particularly eloquent example of Olsen’s work from this inspired period of rural contentment – a chapter which also featured the magnificent Summer at Rydal, 1997 (a finalist in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ prestigious Wynne Prize the same year), and the celebrated Bathurst butter, 1999 (private collection), which Olsen gifted to Katherine on the occasion of their tenth wedding anniversary. Employing his signature ‘all-at-once’, multi-perspective approach – ‘I’m down on the ground one moment and up flying the next or looking sideways or underneath’⁴ – the work unfolds as a lyrical evocation, rather than a literal transcription, of place. Across the dramatically tilted picture plane, broad, luminous expanses of ochre dissolve into one another, enlivened by quirky notations and delicate calligraphic lines suggesting trees, tracks, gullies and distant vegetation, and punctuated by the meandering waterway that snakes through the composition, its branching tributaries and rivulets appearing almost like veins or arteries coursing through the land. Verdant vegetation gathers along the riverbanks and lower edge while, as the eye ascends through the composition, a sense of depth gradually reasserts itself with the conventional high horizon line and pale sky beyond. Oscillating between intimate detail and expansive panorama, the tiny and the vast, thus Fish River, Bathurst attests to Olsen’s remarkable ability to capture the spirit of the Australian landscape – to express ‘a certain mystical throbbing throughout nature’⁵ –while at the same time affirming his abiding belief in the interconnectedness of all living forms and in landscape as a ‘geography of mind, experience and poetic imagination.’⁶

Demonstrating Olsen’s brilliance as a master landscapist, the present work notably 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 in 1991 and his autobiography, Drawn from Life, in 1997, as well as the landmark retrospective hosted by the National Gallery of Victoria and 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., ‘The Masterly Mr Squiggle’, Good Weekend, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 2 September 2006
2. Olsen, J., Drawn from Life, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997, p. 282
3. John Olsen, cited in Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, op. cit., p. 238
4. John Olsen, cited in Hawley, J., ‘John Olsen’, Encounters with Australian Artists, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, 1993, p. 129
5. John Olsen, cited ibid.
6. Hart, D., Australian Painters of the Twentieth Century, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2000

VERONICA ANGELATOS