Pied Beauty

Since he began exhibiting in Sydney during the 1950s, Newcastle-born John Olsen has been celebrated for his exuberant and expressive paintings, instilled with his sense of the spiritual and mystical qualities of the Australian landscape. Meandering lines, floating over fields of translucent colour, often trace the artist’s ‘whole experience’ of the natural world – observed up close and from a distance, and sometimes referencing experiences of flying above.  

Poetry, as well as the Australian environment, has remained a consistent source of inspiration for Olsen. The title and motivation for Pied Beauty, 1969, is derived from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem of the same name (1877). Hopkins’s evocations of nature and all natural things – ‘counter, original, spare and strange’ – is captured in Olsen’s ‘couple-coloured’ and ‘fickle-freckled’ application of paint across the warm pale-pink ground. The painting, purchased by the Gallery the year it was made and at a time when Olsen’s reputation was firmly established, demonstrates the inventiveness of the artist’s imagination and his intuitive handling of paint.

Elle Freak, Associate Curator of Australian Paintings and Sculpture