Description
Five bells was my first commission to paint in situ to cover a wall … I didn’t hesitate. I brushed a line around the core theme, the seed-burst, the life-burst, the sea-harbour, the source of life. Inside and around this core, I painted images drawn from metaphors and similes in [Kenneth] Slessor’s poem of our harbour city, and from my own emotional and physical involvement with the harbour, and with my young family in Watsons Bay …
I wanted to show the Harbour as a movement, a sea suck, and the sound of the water as though I am part of the sea ... The painting says directly what I wanted to say: ‘I am in the sea-harbour, and the sea-harbour is in me’.
John Olsen, 1999
Details
- Work Date:
- 1963
- Location:
- 0th & 21st c Australian art
- Dimensions:
- 264.5 x 274.0 cm board
- Medium:
- oil on hardboard
- Credit Line:
- Purchased with funds provided by the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales 1999