In this collection of fine art archival prints, follow John Olsen’s line through deserts, lakes and ponds, over a monkey’s shoulder and to a mouse’s dinner. Each work is hand-signed and exceptionally rare to market, representing an unique opportunity to add Olsen's infectious joie de vivre to your life.
Hilltops, Lakes and Deserts
In works like ‘Galahs Against Hillside’, ‘Flooded Lake Gregory’ and ‘Salt Lake’, Olsen implants us within the landscape and soaring overhead. He pictures a cliff edge as a live fire and a parched lake bed as misty blue, evoking the surge and recede of life. ‘Flooded Lake Gregory’ leaves metaphors in the line – do you see a tadpole swimming towards an embryo, veins or the roots of a tree?
John Olsen 'Flooded Lake Gregory'
‘Simpson Desert’ is a crescendo, a roaring excavation of inner Australia. While there remains great range in his subjects, it is perhaps great vistas like this that Olsen was best known for, once remarking “There is so much to look at and observe about the Australian landscape, how it varies from tropical to the coastal fringe, and the interior…. It’s a beautiful animal, that landscape.”
Monkeys and Mice
This collection ends on a humorous note. As much as Olsen was a poet of the landscape, he was also a humorist of creatures great and small. In the spindly ‘Monkey’ he presents an assemblage of animals – echidna, monkey and bird – while in ‘Mouse and Gorgonzola’ a mouse is caught heading to dinner. Both are vivacious and charming, reminders that beauty is not rare for those who look.
