By Janet Hawley
Save articles for later
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
John Olsen, then 83, filed out from Margaret Olley’s memorial service at the Art Gallery of NSW in August 2011, stood in the portico and beckoned me over.
Only weeks before, I’d walked out of the gallery with the seemingly invincible Queen Oll, 88, and watched her stand in the same spot, resting on her walking frame while defiantly puffing a cigarette and hobnobbing with art-world friends. A group now clustered around talking to Olsen, but the look on his face under his beret was tender, faraway; lonely among the throng. I wondered if he was thinking of all those pillars of Australian art he’d known as friends, all gone … Ian Fairweather, Fred Williams, William Dobell, Russell Drysdale, Cliff Pugh, Lloyd Rees, Donald Friend, Sid Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Brett Whiteley, John Perceval, Albert Tucker, John Brack, Fred Cress, and now the treasured Olley. Olsen now wore the mantle of Australia’s greatest living artist.
John Olsen at home in the NSW Southern Highlands in 2015.Credit:Brendan Esposito
A few days later I rang Olsen, a man who’s long seen himself as a wandering minstrel of art traversing his beloved Australian landscape. A man who loves thoughtful, meandering conversation and is prone to lace his thoughts with relevant quotes from favourite poems, or break into a few appropriate lines of song. I’d been wondering if he’d driven home sadly after the service, slightly spooked, singing Ten Green Bottles from the top.
I asked Olsen if he’d be willing to talk honestly about something people shy away from discussing, and often go into denial over. It’s that big, scary question: entering the Third Act of Life – not knowing how long you’ve got, how long your body and mind will hold up, or what really happens at the end. How do you feel when you realise that you’ve undeniably entered this phase, and how do you ensure that instead of retreating, or feeling irrelevant and disappointed, you enjoy a fulfilling life to the end? And does Olsen consider it the end, or does he foresee an afterlife?
The ‘aah-ness’ of life
All this has been much on his mind, he admits, as he invites me on another visit to his sprawling property in the NSW Southern Highlands. On the gloriously sunny spring day I’m there, it seems like an earthly paradise. The rambling garden is riotous with colour: Wordsworthian swaths of golden daffodils, purple hyacinths, bluebells; trees prolifically blossoming, tumbling white wisteria, lemon and orange trees laden with ripe fruit. Butterflies dance, bees and birds noisily feast on abundant nectar; two great Danes prance about as gleaming-coated Lusitano dressage horses lazily chomp grass.
Olsen appears strolling from his studio through the birch grove, wearing a salmon-pink sweater. He has a sage-like presence these days, like a deeply rooted grand old tree; along with a greater sense of contentment and acceptance. He’s still Peter Pan, too, maintaining his boyish sense of curiosity and wonderment, always seeking “the juice in life”. It’s what he calls “the ‘aaah-ness’ of life” – open your eyes and see exhilarating things, like, “Aaaah, the moon looks like creme brulee.”
“People in the Third Act of Life have gained the maturity and wisdom to look both backwards and forwards,with far greater understanding.″
I’d known Olsen since the early 80s, interviewed him many times, always in interesting locations as he made what he called his gypsy caravan moves to set up a new home, new studio. I’d travelled with him on painting trips, including through southern Queensland in 1993, then suffering its worst drought in living memory.
As weeping farmers shot and mass-buried their starving sheep, the profoundly moved Olsen sketched what he saw and felt, observing: “The landscape has become a giant animal, consuming the people who’ve tried to settle it. What’s left is a giant, parched, empty dinner plate.”
In his Southern Highlands arcadia, Olsen leads me towards his large cheerful kitchen, saying: “I’ve drawn something for your story, after our phone conversation the other day.” On the wooden table, amid piles of well-read poetry books, cookbooks and sketch pads, lies a double-profiled self-portrait of Olsen as Janus.
Above it, in italic script, he’s written: “Dear Janet, there is a Roman God Janus, the guarder of entrances and exits – he could see both ways. As we get older we can see wider points of view – that as younger people we could not see.”
“One great advantage of growing old is we can claim to be like Janus,” Olsen remarks, a grin on his jutting chin. “People in the Third Act of Life have gained the maturity and wisdom to look both backwards and forwards, with far greater understanding. We’ve discovered life is about peaks and valleys, and learning to travel through both. It’s never a level playing field, so forget that!”
People look at John Olsen’s 2005 Archibald Prize-winning painting, Self-portrait Janus-faced.Credit:Jon Reid
Olsen opens his large, thick artist’s diary, as we share a pot of tea. Leafing through that current volume, which started in 2008, it’s clear he’s been thinking a lot about growing old. Vulnerable passages ruminate about the physical limitations and frustrations of ageing. Unflattering drawings show the artist in 2008 after a painful knee-reconstruction operation: a heavy, lumpy body bent double, hobbling on stick-like legs. Telling anecdotes reveal a more compassionate attitude towards others; a keenness to mend broken fences.
“I was reading a book about Matisse in his late life, and he stressed, ‘Do not bear grudges or hatreds, because you are putting a poison into your own system,’” Olsen says. “The way I see it, we’re all in the big river of life. We travel along, then the river runs dry, so we’re stuck in a billabong, a time of disappointments, doubts or depression. Then the rains come, and we’re back in the mainstream till we hit more billabong times.
“And so it goes on till we reach the delta – the Third Act. We can either get bogged in the delta mud and curse it, or we can nourish ourselves in this fertile soil, then burst through to the open sea with a renewed sense of freedom. That’s where I am now.”
The work of many older artists shows this sense of freedom, Olsen maintains. “There’s a synthesis with release, because understanding vulnerability can also make you freer,” he says. “Rembrandt and Cezanne’s earlier work is much tighter, struggling to get an inner vision on canvas; then the handling in later work is freer. Darling old Lloyd Rees knew he was going blind, but his later work became broader, freer.”
He quotes from WB Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick,
unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing.
“Ay yes, we must all go on singing our song, and louder sing,” Olsen shouts to the skies, as we walk up the path to his main studio.
Olsen’s son, Sydney art dealer Tim Olsen, had told me, “Dad’s feeling very philosophical at the moment.” Olley’s death was a blow, his younger sister, Pamela, 77, was in remission from cancer, while his second wife, Valerie (mother to Tim and Louise Olsen) had recently died from brain tumours.
“John was meant to be on the ABC helicopter that crashed lethally into Lake Eyre but wasn’t well enough to go,” adds Tim. “So he’s feeling an incredible vulnerability, yet at the same time has an incredible urge to keep working.
“John’s health is good; he’s had two knee reconstructions, a plumbing issue fixed, and a heart bypass. John describes his body like a car – he reckons he’s got new wheels, a new toolbox and a new engine, so he’ll keep motoring along another decade or two. His mother lived till 90 and his maternal grandmother till 103, so he has good genes.”
Learning from failure
In Olsen’s main studio, numerous sketch pads lie open with gestating drawings. Two studio cats loll proprietarily on the antique Chinese opium bed, where the artist takes an afternoon nap. “The cats have a job to do – stop mice nesting in my piles of papers, and by God they do it, too,” Olsen says.
A side room is dominated by a huge painting table, laden with works in progress, paints, brushes, pastels. Beside it is an exercise bike, where Olsen now “rides the Tour de France” while contemplating the next stage in a painting. In the corner lies a large heap of rejected works, ready for the bonfire.
“The late Rudy Komon was famous among art dealers for sniffing into your failure heap and exclaiming: ‘John, these are masterpieces, I can sell them all!’” Olsen recalls, laughing, “but I do my own quality control.
“One benefit of growing older,” he says, “is that I gained the confidence that I could learn from failure, so I never give up. Investigating your failures enlarges your capacity to create. I still have periods of failure and self-doubt that can go on for weeks, thrashing about trying to find the right way to proceed with paintings that refuse to sing my song … the buggers. My failure rate is still 20 to one; I’ll overpaint or throw out a work 20 times before I’m happy with it. But I start afresh each day, with an inner voice saying, ‘Go on, go on’, knowing I will eventually break through.”
Sydney gallerist Tim Olsen and his father, artist John Olsen, at John’s home and studio in the NSW Southern Highlands in 2020.Credit:James Brickwood
Part of the creative persona is knowing how to endure the creative blocks. “You eventually learn that it requires poise, character and patience to get through the blocks, and wait for the dawning of a new exhilarating high. It’s a cycle, and you must have faith the next inspiration will come.”
He also is adamant that no one can paint, or write, or compose a masterpiece every day. “Sometimes I just want to dilly-dally and paint a prawn, or a frog,” he cheerily admits.
Olsen sits in his rocking chair beside the pot-belly stove. Artists have a lot of time to think – it’s just them and the blank canvas, alone in their studio. Many artists like to paint with music playing. Olsen prefers to paint in silence, to hear his own thoughts.
“When I was at art school, I saw several people who I thought were better painters than I was, but afterwards they were unable to stand that necessary silence and responsibility of working in the studio – which to my mind is the great freedom.
“Freedom is also responsibility, but it’s a different form of responsibility, from having to. There is something far more mysterious, you are finding out secrets, like what true freedom is. The idea that true freedom is doing what you like, is ridiculous.”
“Lake Eyre has become a special spiritual place that draws me to it, a soul place of rich emptiness and fullness.”
His life has been a restless search. “It’s all in the search, the constant looking, staying fully alert and alive. It’s not about achieving success. There are people who are very successful, but live bastards of lives, nothing makes them happy, because their goal of success is what matters, not the searching journey to reach it. To me, the journey is it, not the arrival.”
So what were his thoughts when he knew he’d entered the Third Act? “Looking at it mathematically,” he replies, tossing another log into the fire, “if you expect to live to 90, then 60 is the Third Act. But I didn’t feel I hit it till my late 70s, when I needed a second knee reconstruction. The pain of the first was so awful for six months afterwards, I dreaded going through it again. But I had to, or be in a wheelchair for the rest of my days.
“Finally, I had to start acknowledging the physical limitations of ageing, so annoying for me, as I’ve always loved going on painting expeditions to Lake Eyre and the outback. It’s unfinished business with me, but I can
always fly over it.
“I still paint or draw almost every day, though these days the opium bed is calling by mid-afternoon,” he admits. As he dozes off, he’s eyeing a wall of photographs of departed artist mates: Nolan, Drysdale, Williams, Friend, Whiteley. “Hello, clever Sid; hello, Tas; hello; Freddie who ate too much; hello, naughty Donald, you dear rascal; hello Brett, too careless with your lovely talent and that silly heroin … you’re all there, waiting for me …” he says gently, waving towards them. “I have an appointment with you lads, but sorry, I haven’t got the date …”
Olsen was raised a Catholic, attended a Catholic school and grew up believing Catholic dogma. “I liked the rituals, theatre and mystery of the old-fashioned church, and I believed heaven was up there, though if I tried, I could never draw it,” he says. “For decades I struggled with religion, church rules and dogma, and the question of one true God, then 20 years ago I became agnostic.”
‘The force of nature is my muse, my god’
In 1974, he made the first of what became regular trips to Lake Eyre, to watch swollen rivers pour into the dry lake, filling it to become a vast inland sea. “The silent salt pans spring alive, birds, plant and animal life teem in, then it all dries out and becomes a silent expanse again,” Olsen explains.
“Lake Eyre has become a special spiritual place that draws me to it, a soul place of rich emptiness and fullness. You feel so insignificant in that vastness. When I witness this miracle of nature, and look up to the stars at night, I think surely there must be some giant creative force behind it … but it’s so overwhelming, it’s too big a question … “It’s unknowable,” he says, grappling for words. “The force of nature is my muse, my god.”
'Lake Eyre – birds Leaving' by John Olsen, 2019.
In his 60s, Olsen became an atheist for a week, but the effect on him was extraordinary. “My paintings suddenly became dry, the juice disappeared,” he recalls. “Everything growing, like trees, flowers, even the sky and clouds, had a desiccated feeling. The bounce of nature, with everything in flux, so beautiful and alive, disappeared. So I hurried back to being agnostic.”
Olsen stresses that his views are personal and not an attack on any religious body. He respects the fact that religion offers great solace to masses of people, and feels it’s good that they retain their beliefs. “I think church rules and dogma spoilt it for me,” he admits. “Nor can I believe in the concept of an afterlife. I believe our life on earth is just a short holiday from eternity.
“To deal with life as just a warehouse, without the magic of trees, birds, floating clouds, rivers and love, is a terrible mistake.”
“It’s a comforting thought that I’d meet up with my old artist friends in paradise, but I was being flippant saying that. To me, when you die, the movie ends. I can’t think of a god sitting up there in heaven with a book, marking off the entire world’s people with pluses and minuses to decide who he lets in through the pearly gates and who descends to hell.”
Life is very beautiful, he emphasises, and he continues to experience sublime moments with nature and humbling states of grace with people. “Seize the day and don’t waste your life,” he advocates. “Take a lot of memories with you, when the curtain closes. I think it’s tragic to see people imprison themselves in a job or situation they don’t like, because this is the only life you’ll have. To deal with life as just a warehouse, without the magic of trees, birds, floating clouds, rivers and love, is a terrible mistake.
“In a free country like Australia, no matter what circumstances you’re born in, ultimately life is what you make it. I’m saddened when I see people who’ve surrendered to miserable circumstances, and lack the inner drive to pull themselves out of the bog. This attitude that it’s too late to make a change, or you’re too old to learn anything new, is so negative – you’ve already put yourself into the coffin.”
Olsen was born with a gregarious spirit and a passion to be an artist and made the most of both. “I realise how lucky I am, that I found my song, and that art will be a fulfilling passion offering new challenges and joys until the day I die,” Olsen says. “I don’t have to retire, or look for something interesting to do, or play golf. I’ll be an artist to the end, like a dog’s a dog. It stays with you forever.
“But If I don’t paint or draw most days, I feel anxious, because I want to know more. I need to paint something, to understand it. I can’t construct it in my mind – it’s only in the process of working that I can solve the problem.”
He has great sympathy for others whose lives didn’t work out the way they’d hoped, and feel life is a disappointment. They’re approaching the end of this long passageway and look back, thinking, ‘Well, what was that all about?’ There’s no sense beating yourself up over it, as at this point you need encouragement from those around you, to stress that it’s okay, and your life was not a failure. Maybe you’ve been a successful human being in ways you don’t realise. You’ve made a lovely garden that gives passers-by pleasure; you’ve been a loyal friend and helped people in trouble. You’ve shared long conversations – a good conversation is an act of friendship, of love.
“So many small things are immensely valuable in the community; we can’t all be CEOs or celebrity chefs, for God’s sake.”
I venture to ask, if Olsen were to write his own epitaph, what would it say? “Hmm …” A smile spreads across his face and he continues, “I think just, ‘John Olsen, painter. He felt the primacy of the deep cadmium-yellow side
of life.’ I’m just mad about egg yolk colours; cadmium yellow is such an optimistic colour,” he adds.
Olsen loves to cook, the whole alchemy of turning ingredients into a meal. But as time has disappeared, a household helper skilled in the culinary arts has whipped up a late lunch of spinach frittata, using the Olsens’ hens’ deep cadmium-yellow-yolked eggs, daubed with sour cream and yellow cod’s roe. The artist begins to ponder aspects of modern life that worry him. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, he’s concerned at the decline in painting – that is, with paints and brushes on canvas – and the rise in contemporary art such as installations, videos, conceptual and performance art like Tracey Emin’s unmade bed.
“To me, there’s no nourishment in this style of work, to compel you to linger and keep looking at it, and return again and again to discover something profound,” Olsen says. “I agree with Lucian Freud when he looked at Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde. Freud said, ‘It’s okay, it’s clever, but after you’ve seen it once, there’s not much to come back to.’ The character Gulley Jimson put it best in that marvellous book The Horse’s Mouth: ‘It’s like farting Annie Laurie through a keyhole. It may be clever but is it worth the trouble?’ Where is the achievement?”
John Olsen’s Sydney Sun.Credit:Publicity Artwork
He also worries that people’s brains are changing: “No one seems to have time to think deeply any more. Everyone is multitasking, skimming screens for instant information; spending hours superficially speed reading. There’s no poetry in skimming the internet. We have this explosion of information, but where is the parallel explosion of wisdom? I doubt if artists, or others, are now capable of undergoing the long dedicated isolation to achieve wondrous results, like Cezanne and Van Gogh did. Few seem to be prepared to spend decades struggling to reach a goal; it’s all about instant results, instant gratification.”
Nor does Olsen like the rise of political correctness. “It’s hypocritical. If you can’t be forthright and say what you think, it makes us a very limp society.”
‘I have no fear of death’
As someone raised to write perfect copperplate with pen and ink, before he switched to writing in italic script, Olsen despairs over the decline in handwriting. “The only handwriting many people do now is a signature,” he points out. “Handwriting is self- expression, a keyboard is not.”
Aeons ago, when Olsen taught a children’s art class, he asked a six-year-old boy what he was doing. “I’m drawing my think,” the child replied. “What a perfect answer,” says Olsen. “And that’s what I try to do, too – I’m painting my think.”
When Olsen is on a roll painting, he’s a delight to watch; it’s the same seeing him exuberantly cook in his kitchen, slicing and slurping wondrous combinations of colours, tastes, textures. He’ll pick up a brush, load it with paint, make the first mark on the canvas, then the line goes for a quiet walk and ends up becoming a vast journey. The artist becomes what he paints, and along the way enjoys slipping self-portraits into his squiggly line, a jutting chin, his eyes in a flower, his head becomes a hill, his spirit inhabits a bouncy frog.
But when I return to visit Olsen a week later for the photo shoot, he remarks, “I’ve been having a shit of a time in the studio for the past few days; all pain and no progress. My reject pile is growing. I overworked a painting yesterday and tossed it – there’s nothing worse than an over-virtuous lady or an over-virtuous painting. I wish it was easier, yet in a way I don’t wish it was easy, because then it wouldn’t feel like the journey. But at 4am this morning, I awoke with an idea I want to try.”
John Olsen in his NSW Southern Highlands studio during lockdown in 2021.Credit:Tim Olsen
He’s underpainted a large sheet of French art paper in preparation. Loading a house-paint-sized brush with cerulean blue, he brushes a thick line across the top of the paper, then lifts the edge up high, to watch the paint weave trickly lines down to the other end. His face beams as he guides the lines with a brush. “See,” he says, “it’s the waters running into Lake Eyre!”
“Now for the salt,” he continues, mixing up white gouache. “It’s got a good feel, I think I’ve got the movement, got the right rhythm going.” With all this joy and energy in the room, it seems terrible to ask Olsen if he fears death. “No, I have no fear of death, but its inconvenience annoys me,” he responds. “I want to have more time with my family and friends. I still have so much to do, so many more recipes I want to cook, and so much more I want to paint. Every day I look around me at the bounties of nature and see Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Pied Beauty in things, inspiring me to pick up a brush.”
Olsen recites:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim …
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) …
Praise him.
You keep on referring to God, I put it to Olsen. “Oh dear, I do, too,” he agrees, a broad grin spreading. “Well, I am agnostic, so perhaps there’s still an area of doubt.” A few months later, Olsen made his final home move to a nearby Southern Highlands property, with more manageable sprawling gardens, and a purpose-built studio adjoining the house, both set on the edge of a large peaceful lake. “It’s all set up, so there’s a covered walkway from my bedroom to the studio, so if needs be, I can get there daily in a wheelchair. I’ll be like Matisse, cutting shapes out with scissors, if I can’t hold a brush. I just want to enjoy it and get good use out of it. There’s yabbies in the lake and I want to taste my yabbies with an aioli that I will make.
“I think I’m going to be like Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night … rage, rage against the dying of the light. I’ll be waving my brushes and calling out, ’Hello, can you hear me? I’m not ready to go yet … Helloo … I’m still too busy singing my song.”
This is an edited extract of a chapter in Artists In Conversation, by Janet Hawley, published by Slattery Media.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.
Most Viewed in Culture
Source: Read Full Article
