John Olsen Zooms in to draw on experience

John Olsen’s life has come full circle as he has returned to the role of teacher.

Artist John Olsen, with his daughter Louise, in his NSW southern highlands studio provides drawing classes to local artists on a monthly basis. Picture: Ken Redpath.

John Olsen has mastered many different media in his 92 years, from his Wynne Prize-winning landscape paintings to sculptures and ceramics.

One medium he has never needed to use was Zoom, yet now the celebrated artist has mastered that, too.

Olsen’s life has come full circle as he has returned to the role of teacher, overseeing a select group of local artists in the intricacies of still life and life drawing from his home studio in the NSW southern highlands, where he has lived for the past 20 years.

On the first Saturday morning of the month, he is joined by five or so fellow artists including his artist and Dinosaur Designs co-founder daughter Louise, Ken Redpath, Karolina Venter, Claire Bond, ­Yvonne Studdert and occasionally Olsen’s fellow Archibald Prize-winning artist Ben Quilty, who spearheaded the campaign for a new regional gallery in nearby Bowral, the Southern Highlands Regional Gallery on the grounds of the National Trust Retford Park dairy.

“We’ve got a small painting group, around five people, sometimes with a model, or I’ll tell them to go and get a fish and we’ll paint a fish — one time it was an octopus and recently it was a clutch of big persimmon,” Olsen said.

When the classes threatened to be interrupted by the nation going into lockdown in an attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19 Olsen was determined to find a way to continue. “Why should we stop just because of the corona­virus?” he said. It didn’t take long for him to adapt to teaching over Zoom instead, and the classes ­resumed. “We’ve continued in that kind of way and that’s been rather nice — it’s a long time since I’ve taught.”

Some of Louise’s earliest memories are of her father teaching, as she would spend every afternoon at the art school Olsen ran with Louise and brother Tim’s artist mother, Valerie, from an old bakery in inner-city Paddington. “I’ve learnt so much from both my parents, since the day I was born,” Louise said. “Dad is such a natural teacher — his whole face lights up and he has lovely insights from his experiences painting. He’s bru­tally honest, and I love that.”

Now that restrictions have been eased, the group is able to meet in person again, although the Zoom has continued for Olsen’s former studio assistant Carlos Barrios, who is based in Queensland. They often focus on a particular artist — Degas if they’re doing a life drawing or ­Morandi if it’s a still life — and at the end of the class they break for lunch, a glass of wine and some constructive feedback on each other’s work.

After many years focusing on landscape painting, Lake Eyre in particular, Olsen has begun painting Sydney Harbour once more. One of his most famous harbour works is Salute to Five Bells, the vast 21m-wide canvas he was commissioned to paint for the Sydney Opera House that was officially opened by the Queen in 1973, ­inspired by Australian poet Kenneth Slessor’s poem Five Bells. The poem is a tribute to Slessor’s friend who drowned in Sydney Harbour after falling from a ferry.

Olsen says Sydney Harbour holds an important place in his memory, having lived and painted for many years with his young family in a weatherboard cottage in the harbourside suburb of ­Watsons Bay.

“I lived by the harbour for so long and in art, memory is a powerful thing. You’ve just got to find a strategy to somehow reveal those memories in a different kind of way,” Olsen said.

Tim Olsen runs the Olsen Gallery in inner-city Woollahra and is hopeful of holding an exhibition of eight or more of his father’s new paintings inspired by Sydney ­Harbour.

For now, Olsen is revelling in teaching as much as he is in ­painting.

“Curiously enough, it clarifies the ideas floating around inside my head, so if you have to verbalise it, you think, ‘Well this has to make sense.’

“And I’m very enthusiastic about it, for an old guy.”

Both the classes and the new series have proved a welcome distraction from the ongoing court battle Olsen has been caught up in following his stepdaughter Karen Mentink’s recent appeal against a Supreme Court judgment that found she had preyed upon her dying mother to “gift” her with more than $2.2m just weeks ­before she died.

“The finding from the hearing should be handed down in the next few days — it will [eventually] draw to an end,” Louise says. “And there’s healing in creativity, having a passion and love for something is so healing.”