The Australia Show / Nolan Prints at the Tate

I had been to the Australia show at the Royal Academy last year. Found it interesting and informative, with some great contemporary painters on display, but personally the highlight of the show was seeing a selection of Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series in real life.

Sidney Nolan OM, AC [1917 -92] was one of Australia's best known painters, and the earliest influence on my artistic development. My mother had bought a set of prints of Nolan's Ned Kelly series sometime in the 1960's, and they hung in our playroom throughout my childhood. During my teenage years, with the aid of certain wild fungi, to gain a real appreciation of Nolan's style, and his method of abstracting Kelly down to two rectangular black boxes -representations of Kelly's homemade steel armour. Today Nolan's Kelly series are still influencing my work -showing me how bodies can be abstracted, and how the combination of human and non-human elements - the black steel armour together with human eyes, can create a being which is greater than the sum of its parts.

The colours which Nolan uses in this series are truly rich and evocative, especially the blues of his skies, although the varied shades of green he uses in the Stringybark Creek painting are exceptional for the way they accurately describe that sensation of vegetation and shade from bright sunlight. It was something I noticed at the Australia show -how dramatically many of the Australian artists, including First Nation Australian artists, make use of colour, and I could not help but wonder if this has something to do with the quality of light available to artists under their skies so close to Antarctica.

Seeing a few of the Nolan's at the RA was extremely nostalgic, so much so that I made a request to Tate Britain's print room to view the entire series which they have prints of, and duly went along to see them last week. It was an emotional moment to see these prints again, exactly the same ones that my mother owned when I was a child. As the first art that I grew up with and had a deep connection with, they will always be some of my favourite and the most important works in my development as an artist. Who knows, perhaps it was the Nolan's which tipped the balance in favour of my development of a figurative practice.





 
 
 
 

Saved for last, the most iconic image of all, my personal favourite....