Sidney Nolan's Influence On Australian Life

Sidney Nolan
Well known for his depictions of Australian life, Sidney Nolan became one of Australia’s most recognisable artists. 2017 marks the hundredth year of his birth (22nd April 1917). This provides a rare opportunity to reintroduce some of Nolan’s work and artistic visions. The event contains a collection of artworks throughout Nolan’s life and includes part of the Ned Kelly that Nolan is most well known for.
Renowned for his depictions of the Kelly Gang bushrangers, his interest in the negative aspects of life also led to depictions of shipwreck victim Eliza Fraser and the explorers Burke and Wills. It is Nolan’s iconic paintings of the Kelly Gang that led to the development of Ned Kelly as a symbol for Australian history and identity.

Most of his artworks use oil on hardboard and ripolin on hardboard, but Nolan also experimented other materials and surfaces such as pastels and hessian sacking.
Nolan studied at the National Gallery of Victoria’s School of Art but was mainly a self-taught man, having read books studying Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and surrealists.

In 1938 he joined a group known as the Angry Penguins, named after the radical cultural journal, which sought to influence Australian art by adopting the unique and modern ideas associated with surrealism. (Art Gallery NSW 2017) He was conscripted into the army in 1942, where he spent two years in north-western Victoria. However in 1944 he deserted the army, and Nolan lived under the fake name of Robert Murray, where he began the series he was most known for – his depiction of Ned Kelly. (Art Gallery NSW

2017)
In 1947, Nolan travelled across Australia where he began his depictions of the shipwreck victim Mrs Eliza Fraser and the explorers Burke and Wills. He left Australia in 1951, spending time in Europe and the USA. His work continued to maintain the themes that had been recurring through his early career, frequently returning to and referencing the Kelly Gang, Eliza Fraser and Burke and Wills. “Nolan was knighted in 1981 and made an associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts (UK) in 1987 and a companion of the Order of Australia in 1988. He passed away in London, on the 28th on November 1992.” (Art Gallery NSW 2017)

Themes
In order to better understand Nolan’s works, we must first understand the themes that Nolan himself liked to revisit.

Having studied art in Australia, Nolan’s works featured a lot of Australian landscapes and icons. Even though in his later life he had left Australia, Nolan continued to paint the Australian outback and bushlands, and Ned Kelly (Kelly 1956). More negative emotions seemed to capture Nolan’s interests – his empathy towards the bushranger Ned Kelly, shipwreck victims and the death of explorers became his main topics and those emotions are transferred through the paintings. These themes of loss and tragedy can be seen throughout his oeuvre.
Cultural movements also played a role in developing Nolan’s unique style – self-taught in surrealism and seeking to use modernism to advance Australian art and poetry, these movements can also be seen throughout his works.
Modernism represents those who felt that old forms were becoming outdated in the new age of the industrialised world – characteristic of modernism is the experimentation with form, and the idea of rejecting realism. (Wikipedia

2017)
Surrealism aims to resolve the dichotomy between dream and reality by combining them into a “super-reality”. (Wikipedia 2017) The intention of expressing the unconscious led to images with illogical scenes that surprised viewers with its confusing combination of realistic depiction of dreamlike scenarios.

The Camp (1946)
The Camp depicts Ned Kelly scouting out the policemen that were sent to capture him.
Part of Nolan’s renown Ned Kelly series, The Camp harkens back to Nolan’s own past as a soldier. Nolan had deserted the army and lived in hiding, and it was during this time that he became obsessed with the stories of the bushranger Ned Kelly. “In the Kelly series, Ned Kelly is a metaphor for Nolan himself. Facing the threat of being sent into the front lines, he deserted, becoming a fugitive.” (Wikipedia 2017) It is in this that Nolan finds a point of connection towards Kelly and can empathise with his situation.
“The Kelly paintings are secretly about myself…. From 1945 to 1947 there were emotional and complicated events in my own life. It’s an inner history of my own emotions” – Sidney Nolan 1989
Finding similarity in Ned Kelly through his working class background and Irish ancestry, Nolan depicted Ned Kelly’s history through his own impressions and perspective to produce one of Australia’s greatest art series. (Wikipedia 2017)
The painting was done using ripolin enamel and alkyd on hardboard, resulting in the coarse texture and painterly style that can be seen. The use of strong contrast between the foreground and background help separate the scenes, and help emphasise Ned Kelly as an important figure. The colours feature a semi-realistic approach but have a surrealist and modernist spin to it – the figure of Ned Kelly and the bush take on a kind of surrealist approach, with the sparsely scattered trees and Ned Kelly’s other figure blending into the bush. This other figure holds the gun, with its shape filled in with the bush behind it symbolic of Ned Kelly’s ability to not be found. This is mimetic of what Ned Kelly was within the armour – the black shadow of an armour was meant to protect and nothing more for it was still Kelly himself that fired the gun. A modernist use of electric blue brings a vibrancy to the image, and it is this fusion of ideas that create such a unique piece of art. The policeman walking unknowingly towards Kelly creates the tension within the environment as Kelly’s eyes scout his approach.

Drought Skeleton (1953)
Drought Skeleton shows the last of the animal’s rotting flesh through its ribcage.
As seen through Nolan’s other works, he finds concepts of negative emotion alluring.
“Death takes a curiously abstract pattern under these arid conditions. Carcasses of animals are preserved in strange shapes, which often kind of have a beauty or even grim elegance” – Sidney Nolan 1952
Nolan was commissioned by the Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail newspaper to document the effects of the severe drought that was occurring on the northern part of Australia. A similar experience occurred on a recent trip to Italy, where Nolan visited Pompeii. The mangled limbs of carcasses that resulted from the drought very closely resembled the shapes of the animals and humans petrified in the ashes of Mt Vesuvius.

The artwork was created with oil on hardboard with colours primarily being reds, browns and pinks. The small variety of colours emphasise the life that is lacking in the image, mimetic of the animal itself as well. Desaturated colours also help create the vision of drought – as if the moisture in the painting had been sucked out of the image itself. The subject is placed on a flat, solid background to minimise distractions and clutter so that the focus becomes purely the carcass itself. The choice of posture is to try and recreate the image and emotion that Nolan saw through the drought and Pompeii – The subject is frozen in a pose that seems mid-motion. Through this, Nolan tries to capture the “grim elegance” that he sees through the sense of life that is suddenly stopped as if time has frozen. The raw bones and rotting flesh provide the grim insight into life – there is so much beauty in life, and the loss of life is saddening. At the same time, it is also showing the death itself has meaning – it is through death that we observe something otherwise unseen. To some, the inner workings of living creatures can prove fascinating, and without a wider understanding of our world we are limited by what we see. To Nolan, life and death have their own versions of beauty.
Central Australia (1950)
Central Australia shows the unique jagged formation of the Central Australian landscape.
In 1949, Nolan travelled around Australia with his wife Cynthia and daughter Jinx through Central Australia. It is through his encounters with the vast landscapes that led to Nolan evolving his practice.
This painting was done with ripolin enamel and oil on hardboard with the main colours used being reds and browns. As is characteristic of Nolan’s works, Australian landscapes play a large role in his oeuvre and therefore details associated with Australian landscapes becomes also prevalent in Nolan’s works. Such an example is his frequent use of reds and browns throughout his works, due the choice of landscape that he paints. This idea is slightly reminiscent of surrealist ideas of representing dream like scenes with a realistic perspective. This is enhanced by his use of highly saturated colours, to help enforce the dream-like feel of the image. Nolan’s aerial perspective creates the endlessness of the landscape and sky helps create a sense of scale and creates a feeling of the sublime. It is through Nolan’s depictions of Central Australia that urban Australians were able to capture a part of that beauty for themselves that they had once never known.