Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Left John Olsen Dylan's Country 1957 Oil on canvas 92x72.5cm The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Right John Olsen Granada 1959 Oil on canvas 99x119cm Dr Joseph Brown, ao , obe Photograph by Garry Sommerfeld expressive, fluid metamorphic forms recall Jean Dubuffet and the COBRA group, as well as an indebtedness to the interchangeable nature of the images in Pacific and Melanesian carvings .15 As we journey through the painting we encounter larrikin and surreal heads grafted onto the body of the landscape, with breasts, male genitalia and an umbilical cord suggesting fertility and reinforcing a sense of bodily identification with the landscape .16 The richly animated surface is simultaneously like muddy tracks, a lizard skin and the bark of a tree ,17 which, along with the earth tonalities, hand prints and multiple striations, also reveal Olsens admiration of Aboriginal rock engravings and bark paintings, 'magnificently charged with the mystic [sic] of the Australian landscape and its creatures '.18 Both the propulsive energy and the impression of 'all things united as in one great chain of being '19 recall Olsen's aim to express an animistic quality — 'a certain mystical throbbing throughout nature'. However, Olsens ideas about the Australian ethos were varied and cumulative, incorporating a feeling for both the sacred and profane, magical vitality and ironic humour. His use of irrational imagery, along with his alertness to the Australian vernacular in the title 'beaut', revealed a double-edged humour: I noticed that Australians were saying that Leonardo can be beaut, a trip in a car can be beaut, an ice cream can be beaut, and really it's a corruption of the beautiful .20 This amounted to a bizarre aesthetic, in which he perceived an important ingredient of Australian society in its vulgarity: I feel it is something one would ignore very much at one's peril. It is a pretty bitter pill to take but if you miss it you miss the lot. Let life as a totality come into your painting .21 Virginia Spate noted: Here Klee's wit is transformed into Rabelasian laughter. Yet for all its laughter, one recognises that the painting is a serious thing... It is a wild jo y ... it has an intensity that disturbs and threatens ... Dubuffet meant the same thing and he could have been speaking of the Journey into the You Beaut Country when he wrote, 'Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid '.22 'COME WITH ME ON THIS JOURNEY' 283