Provenance:
Private collection Queensland

Central Australian Landscape c.1981 and the following two landscapes of the same year re-emphasise what Nolan has accomplished for Australian landscape. Heralded as the first honest depiction of the Australian desert in 1949 when forty-seven Central Australia paintings were exhibited at David Jones Art Gallery,1 Nolan saw the landscape through Australian eyes rather than trying to conform to a European tradition. Although the outback is seen as fundamental to the Australian identity, Australia’s great inland remains to many Australians a distant, severe, foreign, silent entity. Nolan’s Central Australia paintings focus on the diversity and uniqueness of the terrain, opening the viewer’s eyes to a vital, boundless, light drenched place full of wonder, spirit and life. As Nolan himself stated in 1978, ‘In some ways it is most difficult for Australian artists to paint the landscape, because there is no light so intense and dispersing as we have.’2
CH

1Lynn. E., Sidney Nolan: Myth and Imagery, Macmillan and Company LTD, London, 1967, p.33.
2 Lynn. E., and Nolan. S., Sidney Nolan – Australia, Bay Books, Australia, 1979, p.198.