Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'COME WITH ME ON THIS JOURNEY' John Olsen Journey into the You Beaut Country no.2 Deborah Hart One of the most notable qualities of Olsen's art is its regionalism. Painfully, gracelessly sometimes, but with passion and intensity, it builds up images of this particular time and place. It could have been produced I think, nowhere else. Robert Hughes, 19611 The river is within us, the sea is all about us. T. S. Eliot, 19442 J ourney into the You Beaut Country no.2 1961 (Queensland Art Gallery) is a major painting in John Olsen's artistic output and in the history of Australian art. It is one of a relatively small group of works known as the 'You Beaut Country' series.3When they were first exhibited, their impart was swiff and intense. Here was a vision of an Australian ethos that was neither the pastoral idyll of the open landscape, nor the threat of the bush or the desert interior. Instead it was a layered, cumulative vision of place encompassing the unexpected, the animistic and the irrational. As opposed to the Renaissance conception of landscape that depended on perspectival space, in Olsen's works, near and far, the macrocosm and microcosm were brought together as an organic entity, a 'totality of experience'. Neither wholly abstract nor wholly figurative, the works in the You Beaut Country' series are in essence landscapes of mind, imagination and experience, made vital by a sense of passionate engagement with process and with the local environment. While Journey into the You Beaut Country no.2 1961 is a seminal work of the period, Sea flux 1963 is a more exploratory brush, charcoal and pastel drawing. Nevertheless, both examples in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection are characteristic of Olsen's distinctive means of expression Facing page John Olsen Australia b.1928 Journey into the You Beaut Country no.2 1961 Oil on composition board 185.8 X 124.2cm Purchased 1961 Queensland Art Gallery that emerged with clarity in the early 1960s. Both represent the culmination of a struggle during the mid to late 1950s to discover what Olsen described as 'a new figuration'4— an attempt to go beyond the boundaries of literal representation without losing imagery and content. Both reveal the profound impact of the artist Paul Klee's poetic insights into the creative process — that art should 'make the invisible visible' that 'forming is a growing, developing process like a plant or a living organism' and that an artist could 'take line for a walk'.5 In 1956, when Olsen's work began to break away from direct figurative representation towards a more abstract conception, he wrote: My painting takes on its particular abstract quality because only in this way can I express my search for direct mystical experience. There is the feeling of an abyss, a void between oneself and everything outside, and one has the impulse to bridge it. The thing which I always endeavour to express is an animistic quality — a certain mystical throbbing throughout nature.6 While in 1956 Olsen's work was broadly geometrical in emphasis, during the ensuing period when he was living in Spain he began to adopt an organic linear approach, revealing a more empathetic response to the natural world in the painting process. Drawing upon the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Olsen incorporated into his work the notion: 'I am in the landscape and the landscape is in me'. The consideration that we affect the landscape and are, in turn, profoundly affected by it, was reinforced for Olsen in his reading about Zen Buddhism. As he noted in his journal in 1958, 'Zen realises that our nature is at one with objective nature ... in the sense that we live in nature and nature lives in us'. Texts such as D. T. Suzukis Zen and Japanese Culture and Eugen Hemgel's Zen in the Art of Archery allied this idea with an intuitive response in the painting process, 'attuning the mind to the utmost fluidity or mobility, to acquire the spontaneity of natural growth'.7 Such ideas began to be manifested in the fluid linearity of Dylan's Country 1957 (The Art Gallery of New South Wales), a precursor for works of the 1960s such as Sea flux 1963. The title of this painting refers to the Welsh poet and author Dylan Thomas — a source of ongoing inspiration for Olsen. It was in Thomas's radio play Under Milk Wood that Olsen discovered the seaport of Laughame and was stimulated by the ways in which the sequence of events unfolded from night to morning and back to night 'as a totality of experience': ... I feel in paintings like Dylan's Country that one gets the feeling of the landscape as a totality as opposed to the Renaissance ideal: 'here I stand; where I look is landscape'. This is too visual and its basic flaw is that it does not inhabit the landscape. Questions come to mind: What is it like to get a totality of the Riverina, the Dead Heart and other parts of our wonderful landscape — to travel through, to feel the rise and fall of hill and plain, to circumvent and come back where I have been before? I cannot help thinking of Klee's lead when he said: 'The line goes for a holiday'.8 The notions of taking a metaphorical journey through the landscape and of the landscape 'as a totality' were encompassed 280 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965