Seated on a bench underneath his paintings of Lake Eyre, John Olsen leans into the microphone and swears. Loudly.
“I want you to listen to the crows,” he says, pausing so the crowd of art critics and media-types can hear the recorded caw booming through the gallery speakers. “As the crows are flying over Lake Eyre, they’re really saying, FAAARK! FAAARK! What am I doing here?!”
The crowd laughs as Olsen, in his artist’s uniform of a black beret and navy jacket buttoned tight over a red turtleneck, colour-matched with his pocket square and socks, beams.
At 88 years old, the man known as Australia’s greatest living painter – whose works adorn every big Australian institution, including the office of the prime minister – is adept at playing the room.
He sings. He recites poetry. He studs his words with declarations of wonder. “Wow! Isn’t that fantastic?”
It’s an exuberant performance, and one Olsen has been running all week. His latest exhibition, a 70-year retrospective of his distinguished painting career, opened at the National Gallery of Victoria on Friday.
It is the largest exhibition of his career and features pottery and journals as well as a collection of his best-known works, the oldest painted in 1952 and the latest completed just two months ago.
When curator David Hurlston opens the exhibition for a preview on Wednesday, Olsen, palette in hand, is putting the final touches on a mural at the entrance. He feigns shock when the photographers rush toward him and then poses happily for the camera, explaining his steps. “I want to know how the landscape writes itself,” he says, before adopting a singsong voice. “There’s marvellous pictures that have been done, foreground, middle distance, background, tralalalala ... I want to give life to things, because life itself demands that.”
With his twinkling blue eyes and fondness for telling the same story over again, Olsen is the beloved, slightly inappropriate grandfather of the Australian art world. He rose to prominence in the Sydney art scene of the 1960s and remains a product of that era: optimistic, irreverent and slightly problematic – particularly when reckoning with Australia’s colonial past.
The first hint of this in his media appearances this week came on Tuesday night when, in conversation with Radio National’s Phillip Adams, he spoke about the vibrancy he felt upon returning to Sydney in 1960 after years spent working in post-civil war Spain.
“This is the you beaut country,” he said. “This is a country that has never had a civil war, and war has not been known in Australia.”
Australians, he said, were “a new people in a very old country” with a continent “largely undiscovered”.
Adams later objected: the frontier wars, between colonialists and Indigenous peoples, ran long and bloody. Australia has too many places named Slaughterhouse Creek to be considered untouched by war.
But public recognition of that conflict is fairly recent. Peaceful settlement was the established truth until the 1992 Mabo decision, in which the high court found Australia had never been Terra nullius, and that paths trodden by white explorers such as Burke and Wills had been trudged thousands of times before.
Olsen is fascinated by exploration, by crossing the frontier. To be an artist, he says, “is to be an explorer.”
It is what drove him to paint landscapes in the Australian outback, in the Kimberley, far-north Queensland, and of course the famous series on Lake Eyre. He is rightly applauded as the first mainstream artist to paint those scenes, but to talk in those terms today has a feeling of cultural erasure.
“Lake Eyre, now this is one of the extraordinary things that can happen in Australian art – can you believe that this huge salt lake has never been painted before?” Olsen says, shortly before delivering his impression of a foul-mouthed crow. “I mean just the sheer privilege to say this is marvellous.”
Australians, he tells the delighted crowd, are saucer-dwellers, living on the edges of the great continent and ignoring all the interesting bits in the middle. Lake Eyre – a vast salt-pan 15m below sea-level in the South Australian outback that stands empty and inhospitable for years at a time, until the continent gets enough rain to make the rivers run backwards and fill it up – is the very middle of the middle.
“Emptiness is as full as fullness,” Olsen says. “We’ve got the richness of emptiness which for some reason was known as the dead heart. FAAARRK! That’s a lie! That’s not true! It’s teeming with life. And this kind of thing is an exciting thing. To be an Australian artist is to be an explorer.”
There is a wandering quality to Olsen’s landscapes, which he says are intended to take the viewer on a journey. The landscape is written, he says, rather than painted. He is scathing of traditional landscape works, saying Australia should be viewed from the air and in the dry, when everything is a yellow-brown that seems dull and lifeless to the European eye.
It’s an obvious parallel to some Indigenous art, in which the landscape is painted from above and used to tell a story, a dreaming.
Olsen says the similarity was the result of a convergence rather than direct influence.
“It wasn’t influenced by Aboriginal art … one can like, but not be influenced,” he tells Guardian Australia. “It’s not to be forgotten that Aboriginal art is totemic or else journeys to the dreamtime. Now, we can’t possibly get near that and neither should we because it’s impossible to have that same kind of feeling of the land.”
His artworks were different, he says, because he did not claim the same connection to the land, and because they were informed by “a western understanding of art”.
There was no Indigenous art in museums when Olsen was a student in Sydney in the late 1940s, but he and his friends admired it, when they could find it.
“Picasso thought the best art that had come out of Australia was Aboriginal art,” he says. “And it is – it’s very, very good – but there are absences in it that needed to be sort of discovered. Like, for example, in Aboriginal art there is no light.”
Light in Australian art, he says, came from the Heidelberg School, the late 19th century Australian impressionist movement.
Olsen studied art at the Datillo Rubbo Art School in the late 1940s and then the Julian Ashton School in Sydney in the early 1950s. It was a traditional training that included the traditional art student’s right of passage: protesting against the tastes of the establishment.
In his case, the target was the board of trustees for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which he and his peers felt had made the dull choice of William Dargie as winner of the Archibald prize too many times. Dargie, a classical portrait artist, holds the record for winning the lucrative prize eight times. On the seventh win, Olsen and friends stormed the gallery with placards. They later composed a song about the trustee’s controversial decision to award the prize to William Dobell in 1943 for a portrait that was later derided as a caricature. (Olsen and friends liked it.)
He sang the song twice this week at separate media appearances, his voice warbling above the crowd: “William Dobell is my name, twisting faces is my game …”
Olsen won the Archibald with a self-portrait in 2005 (that painting, Self Portrait: Janus Faced, is included in the exhibition), but still refers to famous prize as a “chook raffle”.
He will keep painting, he says, so long as he is breathing. Gesturing to his most recent work to hang in the exhibition, a painting of the Riverina that was completed in July this year, he says, “I think that’s quite good.”
“Where I’m lucky is, they can’t pension me off,” he says, explaining that the process of trying to transfer his ideas on to paper hasn’t changed. “Through all the public acclaim … immediately I get back to the studio and it’s the same thing.”
• John Olsen: The You Beaut Country opens at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from 16 September 2016 to 12 February 2017; it will open at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on 10 March
.png?w=600)
