FOREWORD

STEVEN ALDERTON

Life Of The Land, John Olsen and William Robinson is an exhibition by two of Australia’s most established and significant landscape painters, John Olsen and William Robinson - their work in conversation. The exhibition is to include 30 significant paintings that affirm the experience and sensation of the Australian landscape.

Both artists have developed distinctive visual languages in their explorations of the immense Australian landscape and environment. They are united by their searching and spiritual approach to landscape painting and their interest in aerial and inverted perspectives. They are not stuck in the orthodox of the land, or limited by the formalities of the foreground.

“An Olsen painting combines an implied aerial view with an ambiguous and seemingly unpremeditated figuration. His characteristically quizzical line and irregular squiggles and dots deftly render countless organisms, large and minute. Their environment is conjured through loosely brushed and stained expanses of colour (on canvas or hardboard) That are keyed to natural light. Even when he is referring to the outback landscape, usually noted for its austerity and inhospitality, Olsen’s imagery teems with life. Yet the same lines sometimes read as geological mappings. In Olsen’s work there is no foreground/ middle ground/ background schema, nor any sign of European landscape’s concern with “human scale.” Instead he employs simultaneously the contrary vantages of naturalist and geographer or, to put it another way, the viewpoints of frog and eagle.

”1 In Robinson’s paintings the viewer is drawn into the natural world as an active participant; as though to imaginatively, viscerally and spiritually experience the varied moods of the surroundings in which Robinson has lived and worked over many years. But the manner of Robinson’s interpretation is the factor which has determined his critical and public acclaim. There is invariably a sense of elevation, often contradicted by visual devices which suddenly twist the viewpoints like a rubber band, introducing a sense of looking simultaneously, out, down and up. Add to this, multiple viewpoints which create the impression of being spun, swung and inverted while trying to latch onto reassuring bits of reality. Then there are the glorious absurdities, such as skies embedded within landforms and pouring down edges of compositions like waterfalls. The end result is that the viewer is all
shook up or shaken out of the routines of planting the feet and looking for an insistent horizon.

The exhibition and catalogue essay will consider how we define the Australian landscape in a changing environment.

1 Robert Berlind writing for ‘Art In America’ magazine, on the John Olsen Retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1993: John Olsen at the Art Gallery of New South Wales