John Olsen

(born 1928)

Blue Pond, 1990

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Private collection
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 19 August 1991, lot 354
Private collection, Melbourne


John Olsen believes 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'.1

Having developed an immediately identifiable pictorial language, Olsen's Blue Pond, embodies this notion of viewer connection. In the present work, Olsen delineates the depth of the pond with a blue wash over a labyrinth of entwined lilies, providing the viewer with spontaneous glimpses of a thriving ecosystem as frogs, tortoises and birds are poised along the banks of the pond.

In an interview with the Deborah Hart when compiling the 1991 monograph, John Olsen discusses his feelings about the environment which had become synonymous within the artists' oeuvre: 'Working on these projects really altered my way of looking at things because I could see not only bird life but a whole range of biology. It is so staggeringly fragile. You have to have the estuaries and the water lands to have the birds, the frogs, the crustaceans. In David Attenborough's film series he indicates that life really began in the water and after thousands of years creatures left the water. There is still in those beautiful lily ponds that whole kind of structure that is the beginning of life'.2

Alex Clark

1. John Olsen, Jenny Zimmer and Ken Magregor, John Olsen: Journeys into the "You Beaut Country", Macmillan Art, Melbourne, 2007, p. 310
2. Deborah Hart, John Olsen, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991, p. 129