November 2008

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

While Australia has recently mounted a lavish retrospective of Sidney Nolan at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, an altogether more intimate chance to view a selection of Nolan’s works was available in Herefordshire from 21-31 August, courtesy of the Sidney Nolan Trust.

The exhibition, entitled ‘Sidney Nolan: Africa and Australia’, was held in a converted barn situated on the private estate that was the artist’s home in the later years of his life. The paintings on show were the result of Nolan’s visit to Africa in the summer of 1962, where he spent several weeks in Kenya sketching the landscape and its wildlife. Later Nolan visited Ethiopia, intrigued by the destination since a friend, Howard Matthews, introduced him to the work of French poet Arthur Rimbaud who lived in the city of Harar on the eastern border of Ethiopia. The resulting works on board or paper depict a gazelle (above; 1963), the shoulders and heads of Ethiopian women, jumping hyenas and resting wildebeest. Quickly painted in oil or mixed media which was scraped, wiped and pushed round the surface, Nolan was capable of producing up to four works in a day, painting straight onto the surface that rested flat on the floor. Each instantly describes the intensity, heat and physicality of the location.

Accompanying the African series are large works of Nolan’s native Australia, executed with the same speed and freedom, and immediately evoking arid expanses of Australian plain or the shimmer of Eucalyptus in the baking bush. There’s no need to analyse too much here, just simply admire Nolan’s joyous sense of landscape that permeates all of his work and informed his life: in 1983, when Sidney settled in Herefordshire he recorded that he again belonged to a landscape of magnitude and power by recalling a line he had written in his youth: ‘All was static and monumental with the first of the dawn.’

The retrospective ‘Sidney Nolan’ was reviewed in the January 08 issue of Apollo and can be accessed via the Apollo website at:
http://www.apollo-magazine.com/reviews/435116/nolans-hero.thtml

For further information about the Sidney Nolan Trust visit: www.sidneynolantrust.org

   Previous Back to Muse   Next 

Print this article   |  Email to a friend |   Subscription offers | Comment