Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Sydney

EXHIBITED
John Olsen, Barry Stern Gallery, Sydney, 20 – 27 October 1981, cat. 24
John Olsen 81-82 and Noela Hjorth, Bortignon's Kalamunda Gallery of Man, Festival of Perth, 1982, cat. 25 (illus.)

LITERATURE
Ken McGregor and Jenny Zimmer, John Olsen: Journeys into the 'You Beaut Country', Macmillan, Melbourne, 2007, pp. 92-93 (illus.), 314


In 1980 after a brief sojourn in Wagga Wagga, John Olsen and Noella Hjorth relocated to Clarendon, an idyllic semi-rural village on the outskirts of Adelaide. Olsen was re-invigorated by his new environment and its sunny climate which offered distinct similarities to the joie de vivre lifestyle he had encountered during his time in Spain.

Olsen immediately acknowledged the stimulating effect of the relocation noting that 'this will mark a new period in my life and work'. From his South Australian base Olsen explored the his new surroundings and ventured further afield, revisiting the outskirts of the Wimmera and Mallee region, an essentially arid landscape previously portrayed by fellow artists Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd in the decades earlier.

When Mallee Road to Nhill was conceived, Olsen was reading the letters from Sidney Nolan to Joy Hester whilst Nolan's was at Nhill during the second world war. His paintings from this period are now regarded as some of Australia's most important early modernist landscapes. This significant period in Nolan's life and the bleak Mallee landscape that had played an important chapter in defining Australian Art history was not lost on Olsen. He would often create a number of rapid sketches from the air or ground that would be transformed into oil paintings later in his studio showcasing his own abstracted technique of painting. During this time Olsen painted three interrelated Mallee paintings, recording in his diary 'one with gooky emus staring, which I am not absolutely certain of, two of a single road straight as straight can be, going into a wheat town called appropriately Nhill.'1

Olsen's philosophy is that artists should provide the viewer with sufficient recognisable clues to activate the imagination and stimulate them to look deeper into the work: 'Some people are bamboozled by abstraction because they cannot find a link to their own lives. So, by giving them something not necessarily realistic, but something identifiable, they can be drawn into the work and immediately feel empathy with it'.2

Having developed an immediately recognisable pictorial language, Olsen's Mallee Road to Nhill, 1981, embodies this notion of viewer connection. Abstract in composition, Olsen's unique perspective emphasises the sparseness of the weathered landscape. In the present work Olsen delineates the foreground dominated by a golden blaze of dry fields, the diagonal stretch of road leading to an oasis in the form of the distant town of Nhill with its 'silo like cathedral dominating the town' perched upon the horizon like a shining beacon giving direction in an otherwise desolate landscape.

1. John Olsen, diary entry 9 October 1981, in: John Olsen, Drawn from Life, Duffy and Snellgrove, Sydney, 1997, p. 157
2 John Olsen, Jenny Zimmer and Ken Magregor, John Olsen: Journeys into the 'You Beaut Country', Macmillan Art, Melbourne, 2007, p. 310