Deutscher and Hackett

Throughout John Olsen’s long and productive career, he was continuously held in thrall of the natural world, translating its myriad of forms and colours into exuberant oil paintings and fluid works on paper. Olsen sought out, in particular, remote areas of the continent that had retained a ‘mystical ancient appeal’, returning regularly to these touchstone locations such as Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre) in South Australia and the Great Western Desert, where Inscape, Broome was painted in 1999.¹ The artist first visited the multicultural pearling settlement of Broome in 1982 during a ‘modern exploration’ to North-West Australia, supported by the Christensen Fund, in the company of Mary Durack, Geoffrey Dutton, Vincent Serventy and Alex Bortignon. The paintings and drawings from this first interaction with this ancient landscape were later published under the title The Land Beyond Time. Since then, the vast fields of red ochre and their astounding contradictions have featured in dozens of artworks painted during subsequent travels to this remote corner of the continent, often grouped in coherent, documentary exhibitions such as The Flight to Broome, held in 2005.
 
The remoteness and enormous scale of this region of Australia are perfectly suited to Olsen’s use of aerial map-like views of the landscape, drawn from views hanging out the side of a light aircraft. Continuing his investigations of ideas of ‘the edge’ and ‘the void’ that had fed into his work since the 1970s, Inscape Broome is defined by a large central area of negative space and bears compositional similarities to Olsen’s paintings and watercolours of Lake Eyre. Using extensive notes of aerial views and vignettes of colour palettes from his travel diaries, Olsen balances the aesthetic and metaphorical power of a vast basin set against the deep red earth of the Australian centre. Here, the desert meets the sea with a typically Olsen-like porous border. The reddish banks of the coast cling to the paper’s edge while meandering watery lines make incursions into the unknowable void ballooning throughout the centre of the paper sheet. These organic squiggles depict countless organisms and geological features, both large and minute.
 
Olsen fancied himself an explorer, making intrepid expeditions out into the landscape, travelling across it by plane in order to grasp both the awe-inspiring expansiveness and a schematic map-like view of the landscape’s defining contours. ‘The Great Western Desert with its scorched red earth and polka-dotted spinifex – a landscape ancient and worn. Thoughts stain the mind, the landscape appears to radiate in magnetic fields, it draws you in, but holds you back - and it is aloof to intimacy. Then, like a magician’s trick, hey presto, all is gone, suddenly the nacreous waters of Roebuck Bay, Broome. The journey to Broome has revitalised me.’²
 
1. Olsen, J., et al., Land Beyond Time, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1983, n.p.
2. Olsen, cited in Zimmer, J. and McGregor, K., Journeys into the ‘You Beaut Country’, revised edition, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2016, p. 216
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH