Gallery’s major Olsen painting restoration on show

IF John Olsen had realised he was making a seminal artwork, would he have stuck it together with masking tape?

The Art Gallery of Ballarat is restoring Olsen’s Summer in the you beaut Country 2 as part of its upcoming Significant Others exhibition, with the public invited to watch the process take place.

The artwork measures just under six metres by four metres and was painted on the ceiling of a London apartment in seven panels joined with tape.

“Over time the glue on the masking tape has delaminated, it’s kind of gone off so we can’t actually join the panels any longer,” said gallery director Louise Tegart.

As part of the process conservator Catherine Nunn will begin re-sticking the tape with conservation grade adhesive so the painting can again be displayed as a whole.

“It’s a typical Olsen painting, the colours, the landscape, the joyful kind of work,” Tegart said.

“It’s a significant work in the collection that we really want to get out and enable people to see it.”

The artwork was painted on the ceiling of a London apartment in seven panels joined with tape.

The Ballarat gallery has owned the painting since 1976 but it hasn’t been on display since the 1980s, according to Tegart, when it was hung on a wall.

The public restoration is a nod to the performative nature of making the artwork, which was one of several ceiling paintings by Olsen.

Summer in the you beaut Country 2 was painted for Pat Allen, an expatriate Australian pilot, and his English artist wife Penny Colman, both avid art collectors living in London.

They had met the artist through Sydney art dealer Frank McDonald, who had the original Summer in the you beaut Country on the ceiling of his Woollahra home.

That piece is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, complete with a hole where McDonald’s chandelier used to poke through it.

The Allens wanted one too, so in 1965 the artist installed himself in their dining room to work on the painting every day, which took five months.

At the time the artist had been struggling to find work, according to Darleen Bungey’s 2014 biography, and complained of wearing overcoats in summer to cope with the English weather.

He was also desperate for his wife and young family to join him in London, intimate gallery visits with other women notwithstanding.

The you beaut Country ceiling paintings proved to be a stylistic breakthrough for Olsen and he developed them into a series on his return from Europe, setting in motion a lifelong interest in Australian landscapes and Australianness.

John Olsen was one of Australia’s foremost painters with a career that spanned almost seven decades.

Olsen was heartened by the initial response to his painting at the Allens as powerful Sunday Times art critic John Russell visited to take a look and the artist wrote the newspaper critic was “enthusiastic beyond our wildest hopes”.

Russell lay on the floor with a glass of whiskey to contemplate the painting at length and said he wanted one in the boardroom of The Sunday Times, if the conservative businessmen running the paper could be convinced to commission it.

It’s hoped that once the piece is restored, it can be permanently installed in the Art Gallery of Ballarat, but Tegart said she isn’t sure exactly where just yet.

Olsen was one of Australia’s foremost painters with a career that spanned almost seven decades and revolutionised depictions of the country’s landscape.

He died in April aged 95, still painting in the final weeks of his life.

Artists in the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s Significant Others exhibition include Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen, John Brack and Helen Maudsley, Joy Hester and Albert Tucker, and Albert Namatjira and Vincent Namatjira.

Significant Others runs from 4 November until 11 February.

– LIZ HOBDAY/ AAP