Loved ones who gathered at a funeral service for acclaimed Australian artist John Olsen have been told his friend, the late comedian Barry Humphries, was due to give his eulogy.
The service heard Olsen grew up in Newcastle during the Great Depression, in a home without novels or art, and used to draw in his mother's cookbooks.
"An impulse that was something he could never understand, but something he had to do. Draw, draw and draw," Tim Olsen said. It was an impulse that later led Olsen to walk away from a stable job at a bank and pursue a career in art.Olsen's last completed piece, titled The lake recedes, is a finalist in this year's Wynne Prize, which he won in 1969 and 1985.His works also won the Archibald and Sulman prizes, and were exhibited in galleries across the nation and overseas.National Gallery director Nick Mitzevich recently described Olsen as one of the country's greatest artists.
"John was always committed to his subjects. He always wanted you to know it was a landscape, or it was a sunset," he said. "He wanted you to be part of it, he wanted you to feel the energy of the experience of that moment in time."
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