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Lot Essay
'In some of these African animal paintings the delineation of the forms is so ephemeral as to be hardly there at all. There is a sense of transparency, almost of dream, not only of the animals themselves -- fugitive, poised for immediate flight into their amorphous and protective surroundings -- but of the landscape they inabit -- suggestion at the expense of statement.
'Nolan has written of this experience ... 'I feel that there's a kind of painting to be done with animals and natural camouflage that would be in a sense a no-painting, there could be a total disappearance of the image -- but if you stared at it long enough the image would eventually waft up.'' ('Nolan's Animals by Hal Missingham', Art and Australia (Nolan Issue), Volume 5, Number 2, September 1967, p.464)
The observations made on Nolan's African journey in the autumn of 1962 would influence his third reprise of the Kelly subjects in the mid-1960s, with Kelly now receding into the landscape. As Robert Melville wrote of Riverbend II in the 1968 Marlborough exhibition catalogue: 'It's a violent enough incident in which the pursuer is waylaid and killed, but they are diminished by their setting, and treated like small animals camouflaged against larger predators, taking their colour from the pallid trunks of the gum trees. Four panels along, they vanish altogether ...'
'Nolan has written of this experience ... 'I feel that there's a kind of painting to be done with animals and natural camouflage that would be in a sense a no-painting, there could be a total disappearance of the image -- but if you stared at it long enough the image would eventually waft up.'' ('Nolan's Animals by Hal Missingham', Art and Australia (Nolan Issue), Volume 5, Number 2, September 1967, p.464)
The observations made on Nolan's African journey in the autumn of 1962 would influence his third reprise of the Kelly subjects in the mid-1960s, with Kelly now receding into the landscape. As Robert Melville wrote of Riverbend II in the 1968 Marlborough exhibition catalogue: 'It's a violent enough incident in which the pursuer is waylaid and killed, but they are diminished by their setting, and treated like small animals camouflaged against larger predators, taking their colour from the pallid trunks of the gum trees. Four panels along, they vanish altogether ...'