The luscious colours and delicious shapes in John Olsen’s art make it a feast for the eyes.
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On Saturday at Newcastle Art Gallery, people won’t have to just look. They will be able to devour an Olsen painting. Or, at least, a sweet copy of his art.
One of Australia’s greatest living painters, Olsen is returning to the city of his birth for a party at the gallery to celebrate his 89th birthday.
“I’m just so moved and impressed that Newcastle has remembered me this way,” said Olsen, from his Southern Highlands home.
The party will have about 500 guests, including members of the public who applied for free tickets. The venue, which is a stone’s throw from his childhood home, will be decorated with his art, as the gallery’s current exhibition is ‘John Olsen: The City’s Son’. And the icing on the cake will be an Olsen.
Lake Macquarie cake decorator Charmaine Sheehan has spent about 40 hours baking and brushing, mixing and piping, recreating Olsen’s painting, King Sun & the Hunter, which is the exhibition’s centrepiece. The cake artist admitted she had not heard of John Olsen before receiving the commission. On her way to look at the exhibition, she typed his name into the internet.
“I thought, ‘Oh, no!’, but I like a challenge,” Mrs Sheehan said, as she whipped drops of green food colouring into butter cream to recreate his trademark frogs. “It’s an artwork within an artwork.”
The one-metre long cake’s ingredients include about nine kilograms of butter and 38 packets of icing sugar, and how many kilojoules?
“Too many,” laughed Mrs Sheehan, as she brushed on blue and purple edible paints, representing the Hunter River. “But it will be good on the lips for a while.”
Just as the original is good on the eyes. Olsen painted King Sun & the Hunter as a tribute to his home region. The gallery, along with its society and foundation, is fund-raising to buy the painting, so it can remain in the city’s collection. Gallery manager Lauretta Morton wouldn’t disclose what the target amount was but said “we’re well over half-way” and she was “extremely confident” it would be reached.
The Olsen exhibition has attracted more than 21,000 visitors and generated a lot of excitement.
“I’ve been here 15 years, and I’ve never seen a community connection as strong as this,” said Lauretta Morton.
John Olsen, who couldn’t attend the opening in November due to illness, said it was “very humbling” that there had been such a warm response to the exhibition.
“Never in my life could I have imagined such a thing, it’s moved me very much,” the artist said. “I’m going to make it a habit to visit Newcastle at least two or three times a year.”
