Tributes to the painter who additionally utilized his experience to ceramics, tapestry and printmaking poured in after his son, Tim Olsen, revealed his father had died on Tuesday evening, surrounded by family members and household.
“He was a landscape poet to the end and a titan of the Australian art world.”
Olsen was born in Newcastle in 1928 and grew to be a legend, successful the Archibald Prize in 2005 and the Wynne Prize for panorama portray and sculpture twice, in 1969 and 1985.
He was awarded an OBE in 1977 for companies to the humanities and made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2001.
Artists, playwrights and journalists paid tribute to the person who was at numerous phases described as “Australia’s greatest living artist” and the “godfather of Australian art”.
“Sad news. I doubt there’s any Australian whose eye has not been caught by his work at some point,” Hugh Riminton wrote.
Olsen was always drawn to photographs of Australia, with common explorations of solar, water and Lake Eyre in distant South Australia.
But he additionally spent years in Europe within the Fifties and ’60s, drawing affect from Tachist artists Antoni Tàpies and Jean Dubuffet and capturing the colors and rhythms of village life.
“Soon after his return to Australia, he painted the exuberant Spanish encounter 1960, which encapsulates a vitality stemming from his experience of Spain combined with the pulsating activity of Sydney’s inner-city life,” based on a biography of the painter by Art Gallery of NSW.
“The series Journey into the you beaut country, created after his return in the early 1960s, is among his greatest poetical visions of place.”
“Once you begin to appreciate that untidiness it becomes very, very beautiful in itself – and unique,” he mentioned.
“It’s that kind of thing that I was endeavouring to do.”
Amid the reward, Olsen obtained some harsh critiques throughout his profession, together with from one English critic who referred to a portray as “a cascade of diarrhoea”, however the Sydney artist mentioned adverse commentary did not trouble him.
He is survived by his son, Tim, and daughter, Louise,
In a biography of his father printed on the Olsen Gallery web site, Tim famous that “death brings new life”.
‘Powerful’ portrait wins Archibald Prize People’s Choice Award
“This work is a celebration of human life and nature,” he mentioned, of 1 assortment.
“Through melancholy there is subsequent rebirth and its reward is truth and substance in joy.”
Source: www.9news.com.au