Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

in Olsens painting Granada 1959 (Dr Joseph Brown Collection) (initially entitled Lorca's Country ) and paved the way for works such as Journey into the You Beaut Country no.2. In Spain, Olsen had seen the works of Antoni Tàpies and Antonio Saura with their evocative, textured surfaces and these had an impact on works such as Terassé 1959 (private collection) and Granada. It was in these works that he also realised the new figuration he had been seeking. Line circumnavigates and traverses the land, suggesting paths and fields, with the overall form appearing like a living organism, an organic entity. In the upper right-hand comer a figure appears to be growing out of the land, reinforcing the sense of empathy and interconnection. In Granada, Olsen had also begun to attain what he described as 'an emotional colouration of place'. In the case of Spain he noted, 'The Spanish lineage did not explain itself in floral tributes but in blacks, leather browns, burnt reds, blood like crimsons, chamois candle whites'.9 When Olsen returned to Australia in 1960, he spent a brief period in the country at Hill End and then moved to an apartment in Victoria Street, Potts Point, in Sydney. After his experience of an old Mediterranean culture, Olsen found the Australian environment magically alive. Hewas struck by the brightness of the light, the dynamic energy of street and pub life, the brashness of the local vernacular, and the magnificent fluxing harbour with its curvilinear inlets, connecting sea with the land and the metropolis. At Hill End he had been reminded of the space of the country, of the rough and tumble informality of the landscape. A multiplicity of impressions relating to past and present quickly found expression in works such as Spanish Encounter (AGNSW), People who live in Victoria Street (private collection), Australian Flux (AGNSW) and Digger landscape (all undertaken in 1960), Up and down the seaport 1961 (Art Gallery ofWestern Australia) and the 'You Beaut Country' series of 1961. At a time of intense debate about abstraction and figuration in the Australian art world, these works exerted a dramatic impact. The artist Tony Tuckson, then Assistant Director at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, responded with great enthusiasm and was largely responsible for the purchase of Spanish Encounter for the gallery's collection.10For artists such as Colin Lanceley, Olsen's approach was a revelation after much of the art that came under the aegis of Abstract Expressionism at the time, 'all smoky and diffuse — no projection of anything at all'.1 In particular, he responded to the use of demotic imagery in Olsens work, to the ideas of line taking a walk and a totality of experience: Its appeal for me was that it seemed a very inventive approach to painting — it looked as though there could be an enormous vocabulary, a great fund of imagery to be discovered12 The cumulative effects of Olsen's European experiences, the ideas he had derived from other art and literature, and his intense response to the local environment were now filtered and distilled into his idiosyncratic means of expression. This was characterised by bold calligraphic line, a rich array of mark-making and irrational imagery, fused together in a topography of things seen, felt, remembered and experienced. In the spirit of the philosopher Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, Olsen was rebelling against the fixities and rigidities that materialists and logicians ascribed to reality: The real facts of evolution were not to be found in the mechanical elimination of the unfit, but in the creative surge of life, in an élan vital. That propulsive life best known in the living of it, 'bathing in the full stream of experience'.13 John Olsen recalled that the You Beaut Country' series did not begin as a consciously planned strategy but rather emerged in the process of painting. In these works the artist is inviting the viewer on a journey into a world of the unexpected: I'm inviting you to come with me on this journey ... The You Beaut Country is a world of the irrational... we can never exactly premeditate where it is going to lead us ... just like life.14 Journey into the You Beaut Country no.2 is one of the most resolvedworks in the series; it is a layered work affording multiple readings. The irrational imagery and 282 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965