John Olsen was born in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1928. One of the great figures of Australian art, he transformed the way painters looked at and responded to the Australian landscape — bringing to it a calligraphic energy, biological curiosity, and sheer joy of mark-making that was entirely new. His work pulses with life: with frogs, birds, fish, and the teeming, sun-baked vitality of the Australian interior.

Olsen was the first Australian artist Fred Genis worked with on arriving in Sydney in 1979, and the two became close friends — Olsen living near the Kenthurst studio at the time. Their collaboration grew naturally from proximity and mutual respect, and extended well beyond the studio. Together with Dutch artist Theo Kuijpers and fellow Australian Tim Storrier, Fred and John made several trips into the outback — journeys that fed directly into the imagery of their printmaking and deepened a friendship that would last decades.

The prints produced at the Kenthurst studio span Olsen's most characteristic subjects — echidnas, platypus, octopus, kangaroos, sacred monkeys, birds on the Darling River, frogs in swamps, and the artist himself contemplating a fishbowl. The Down Under series of six prints, from the title page through to Bird and Frog, represents the fullest expression of this collaboration — a sustained suite that reads as both a celebration of Australian wildlife and a meditation on the particular quality of life in the continent's vast interior. Artist and Fish Bowl (2006), produced at the Byron Bay studio, marks the final chapter of their long working relationship and also fittingly was Fred’s last work before he retired.

John Olsen was awarded the Order of Australia and remains one of the most beloved and widely collected artists this country has produced. He died in 2023 at the age of 95. see more