Brett Whiteley

Printmaking is a vital and ongoing aspect of John Olsen’s practice. After arriving in Paris as a young artist in 1957, he signed up for classes at the studio of S.W. Hayter, one of the most experimental printmakers of his time. Hayter ‘taught and practised printmaking as a creative, visual, tactile act that exploited free-form imagery and experimentation with materials.’ [Ken McGregor & Jeffrey Makin, ‘Teeming with life: John Olsen, his complete graphics 1957-2005’, Macmillan, 2005, pg. 10]. Hayter’s innovative methods would influence Olsen’s loose and direct approach to printmaking over a long career. Olsen returned to the printing press in the 1970s, by which time, according to him, he was ‘in full flight with printmaking’ [McGregor and Makin, op. cit., p.13]. He worked extensively in Melbourne’s Crossley Print Workshop with printmakers Tate Adams and George Baldessin. In 1975 he began publishing print portfolios with the newly established Port Jackson Press, working from its North Sydney workshop with master printer Max Miller.

Master lithographer Fred Genis was internationally renowned for establishing his Hollander Workshop in New York, where he had worked with artists such as Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler and Jasper Johns. By 1979 Genis had set up a studio near Olsen in Dural, northwest of Sydney. Together he and Olsen collaborated on the celebrated ‘Down Under’ portfolio with the Port Jackson Press, along with this portrait of renowned artist Brett Whiteley, which was published by the Print Council of Australia in an edition of 100.

Olsen’s subjects for his printmaking oeuvre are varied, including landscape and animals, and the occasional portrait. In this portrait of Brett Whiteley, a near contemporary of comparable stature in the Australian art world, Olsen has transformed his subject’s famed head of curly hair into a landscape of its own.

The Gallery holds the lithographic stone for this print in the collection.