The Edge of the World - Lake Eyre 2012

JOHN OLSEN (1928-2023)

The Edge of the World - Lake Eyre 2012

watercolour, gouache and pastel on paper
160.0 x 121.0 cm; 180.0 x 140.0 cm (framed)
signed and dated lower right: John Olsen 012

Provenance:
Metro Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
John Olsen - Lake Eyre: The Desert Sea, Metro Gallery, Melbourne, 26 March - 28 April 2012
La Recopilación, Metro Gallery, Melbourne, 24 March - 20 April 2013
Metro Gallery at Art Central 2015, Hong Kong, 14-16 March 2015
John Olsen: Journey into the 'You Beaut' Country', Metro Gallery, Melbourne, 16 September - 8 October 2016
Australian Greats, Metro Gallery, Melbourne, 30 October - 24 November 2018

Reference:
Olsen, J. & McGregor, K., John Olsen: Drawing - The Human Touch, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p.318 (illus., as Edge of the Void)

We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Kylie Norton with cataloguing this work.

Estimate: $60000 - 80000

Result Hammer: $75000

John Olsen first encountered Lake Eyre in October 1974, when he accompanied naturalist Vincent Serventy on an expedition to witness the lake’s largest flood in 500 years. Twelve months of heavy rains had transformed the lake – ordinarily a parched, desolate saltpan – into a vibrant oasis, teeming with flora and birdlife.

The trip had a profound effect on Olsen, resulting in many of his most celebrated evocations of the Australian landscape.  Olsen would return to Lake Eyre repeatedly over the next five decades:

For Olsen, the lake […] was a place of contradictions, of life and death, fullness and emptiness. Here he could celebrate the ‘festival of life’ in the myriads of creatures in and around the lake, and direct his vital, calligraphic lines into the long, pulsating channels and rivers which travelled through hundreds of kilometres of desert towards Lake Eyre.(1)   

The Edge of the World – Lake Eyre 2012 is a compelling image of ‘fullness and emptiness’.  The composition is dominated by the stark negative space of the lake and its receding waters, which are edged by a morass of pulsating lines.  The once fertile waters of Lake Eyre have become a vacuum, surrounded by tendril-like channels of desert sand.  Olsen creates a vivid colour contrast between the rich ochres of the lake’s periphery and its pale, brackish waters. 

Olsen’s paintings of Lake Eyre and the nearby Simpson Desert often capture the Australian landscape at its most harsh and uncompromising, but they are never despondent.  Rather, these images are a ‘celebration of life forces’,(2) resulting from the artist’s physical and spiritual immersion in the landscape. As the artist explained to journalist Janet Hawley:

Drysdale’s desert pictures are almost like looking at stage machinery,so dramatic and theatrical. Fred Williams is always standing back with   the horizon level slightly up. Nolan is often flying over it. But I’m more intimate, juicy and mucking in with the landscape, getting into bed with it full-on … how like me, darling!(3)

Olsen’s ability to simultaneously convey the intricacy and immensity of the Australian landscape is on full display in the present work. Abandoning the horizon line, Olsen transports the viewer upwards, laying forth an expansive, map-like overlay of the scene. At the same time, we are seemingly plunged into an arterial network of channels and gorges meandering across the picture plane. Olsen’s signature drawing-in-paint technique, encompassing watercolour, gouache and pastel, conveys a vivid sense of movement and fecundity. 

A central feature of The Edge of the World – Lake Eyre is Olsen’s use of negative space: the emptiness occasioned by the lakebed is integral to the composition as a whole. This pictorial device in Olsen’s oeuvre stems from a somewhat unlikely source in Eastern philosophy, the artist having noted in his journal: ‘Remember the Tao – the jug is made of clay but the use of the jug is in its emptiness.’(4) Olsen’s art, then, is one of paradox, where things acquire meaning only in the presence of their opposite.

In The Edge of the World – Lake Eyre, the artist reapproaches a familiar subject with maturity and self-assuredness, while still retaining the brilliance of his original vision. As Barry Pearce attests, ‘A lot of older painters run out of steam and ideas, and get into a formulaic pattern, but that never happens with Olsen. His enthusiasm seems inexhaustible and the world is always fresh to him.’(5)     

Footnotes

1. Hart, D., John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p.133
2. Grishin, S., Australian Art: A History, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2013, p.391
3. John Olsen, quoted in Hawley, J., Artists in Conversation, The Slattery Media Group, Melbourne, 2012, p.32
4. John Olsen, quoted in Hart, D., op. cit., p.133
5. Barry Pearce, quoted in Hawley, J., op. cit., p.32

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