What better way to say goodbye?

In apt recognition of artist John Olsen’s enduring, phenomenal career, a tribute featuring his work will be beamed on to the sails of the Sydney Opera House on the opening night of the Vivid Sydney festival in May.

Olsen, one of the nation’s greatest artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, who was born in Newcastle in 1928, died at home at Bowral in the NSW Southern Highlands on Tuesday night surrounded by his family.

He had been looking forward to seeing his work on “the most famous outdoor canvas in the world” from a harbourside hotel room before “drifting off forever”, he told his children. “What better way to say goodbye?”

Olsen’s Sydney Opera House mural Salute to Five Bells, inspired by Kenneth Slessor’s poem Five Bells, depicts the drowning of a friend of Slessor in Sydney Harbour on a tranquil, moonlit night.

Olsen wanted the work to evoke the magic of a summer night on the harbour, catching the ferry and falling in love. He regarded Slessor’s poem as “a wonderful gift he fell upon”, and set about searching for “that magical blue of Sydney Harbour, with that phosphorescent light from ferries and ships that are passing by”. It will engage Opera House visitors for generations. Created a half-century ago, it was one of the major commissions of Olsen’s career, in which he was represented in galleries and collections in Britain, Europe and the US as well as in all of Australia’s major galleries.

As he told this newspaper seven years ago, poetry, including that of WB Yeats, WH Auden, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender and Gerard Manley Hopkins, which he sometimes committed to memory, was a driving inspiration. “Where is humanity without poetry?” Olsen said. “In a terrible heap. If I was teaching poetry, I could tell you that the kids there would really, really be moved by it. But it’s passed off as something that no one understands.”

Olsen’s depictions of Australia’s landscapes helped shape how we see our continent. “To be an Australian landscape painter is to be an explorer,” he said after donating several works to a regional NSW gallery last year.

“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 so multiple. It’s a beautiful animal, that landscape.” Olsen captured its colour and glorious complexity.

Olsen still loved painting in his mid-90s, and worked until the end of his life.

“He was painting right up to the last in his studio, with friends calling in to see him, which he always loved,” his children Tim and Louise said.

His imagery will enrich Australians’ lives for generations.