New John Olsen works

One of Australia’s most treasured artists, 89, was visiting from the NSW Southern Highlands to donate five sketches and a sculpture, Frog, to the Newcastle Art Gallery.

Two blocks away is the address in Dawson Street, Cooks Hill, where he was born. A small crowd somehow appears each time he stops by – the black beret is a giveaway.

“It’s a reaffirmation, it’s a sense of place. It’s where I scribbled in my mum’s cookbook,” Mr Olsen said.

“It’s where my father remarked, ‘I’m concerned that John might burst his brains’.”

The gallery’s six new Olsens swell its collection to 43, including King Sun & the Hunter, the centerpiece of last summer’s exhibition “John Olsen: the City’s Son”.

Whether or not it’s something residual from his early childhood in 1930s Newcastle, Olsen is pulled to the “strong brown god” of the Hunter River and the harbour it opens out to, and the way it all looks from his room in the Crowne Plaza.

“One has been painting gum trees, but I’d think the harbour is much more interesting. The movement of cranes and shapes intersecting; it’s exciting,” he said.

“When the river gets to the harbour there’s this explosion of energy with vessels waiting outside.”

Mugging for the camera with his bronze Frog – “the kissing is over,” he declared, finally – Olsen stood beneath The sea sun of 5 bells, his mural installed in the gallery’s ceiling.

His approach to painting it in 1964, as to all of his work: “I don’t know what it’s going to look like. It’s terrific”.

The bronze frog, the frog is a reoccurring motif in his works, is on exhibition at Newcastle Art Gallery now. 

The other sketch works will be matted and framed and go through the acquisitions paperwork process before they can be exhibited. 

No exhibition date has been set yet. 

John Olsen was born in Newcastle in 1928, and moved with his family to Bondi in 1935.