One of Australia's most renowned artists, John Olsen, was still painting just three days before his death at age 95.
On Thursday, loved ones gathered at his son's gallery in Sydney's east, a place likened to a church for Olsen, to farewell the cultural titan who died on April 11.
Those gathered heard Olsen's eulogy was meant to be given by "great friend" and comedian Barry Humphries, before the latter's death less than a week ago.
Instead, it was Art Gallery of NSW curator Barry Pearce who did the honours, telling those at Olsen Galleries in Woollahra that Olsen always followed his muse.
Olsen's art hung on the walls and decorated a coffin topped with his trademark beret, as Tim Olsen said his father was a man whose work had a profound impact on Australia's art scene.
"This is the day I've feared all my life. And it's here," he said.
"And it is a celebration. It's not a tragedy.
"It's to praise a man who did nothing but praise everything he saw and everything he felt."
The service heard Olsen grew up in Newcastle during the Great Depression, in a home without novels or art, and used to draw in his mother's cookbooks.
"An impulse that was something he could never understand, but something he had to do. Draw, draw and draw," Tim Olsen said.
It was an impulse that later led Olsen to walk away from a stable job at a bank and pursue a career in art.
That lasted for more than six decades, with Olsen winning hearts and awards along the way.
Olsen's last completed piece, titled The lake recedes, is a finalist in this year's Wynne Prize, which he won in 1969 and 1985.
His works also won the Archibald and Sulman prizes, and were exhibited in galleries across the nation and overseas.
He was acclaimed for his abstract paintings of the Australian landscape.
National Gallery director Nick Mitzevich recently described Olsen as one of the country's greatest artists.
"John was always committed to his subjects. He always wanted you to know it was a landscape, or it was a sunset," he said.
"He wanted you to be part of it, he wanted you to feel the energy of the experience of that moment in time."
