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Lot Essay
In the autumn of 1962, Sidney Nolan travelled to Africa for the first time with his wife, Cynthia. Visiting Harar in Ethiopia, the artist revelled in his encounter with the vast distances and exotic animals native to the landscape and these experiences inspired the artist to create his African series of paintings.
For Nolan, part of the challenge was capturing the subtlety of the animals as they moved through their environment: creating images that would be "a natural camouflage that would be, in a sense, a no-painting." (T. Rosenthal, op.cit., p.179) In Elephant, limestone and sandstone cliffs rise from the ochre-coloured ground, a limpid blue sky streaked with rose-tinted clouds dominates the upper section of the work. The colours recall the shimmering heat of an African day, and the pale stone leaches through the elephant's striated grey body. Despite its bulk, the animal is almost ephemeral, its legs and trunk dissolving into the rocky formations around it.
Nolan's capacity to absorb the world around him and reconfigure it according to his own sensibility extends beyond the confines of his native Australia to the plains of Africa; from his representations of legendary figures of Australian history and Greek mythology to icons of the animal kingdom.
For Nolan, part of the challenge was capturing the subtlety of the animals as they moved through their environment: creating images that would be "a natural camouflage that would be, in a sense, a no-painting." (T. Rosenthal, op.cit., p.179) In Elephant, limestone and sandstone cliffs rise from the ochre-coloured ground, a limpid blue sky streaked with rose-tinted clouds dominates the upper section of the work. The colours recall the shimmering heat of an African day, and the pale stone leaches through the elephant's striated grey body. Despite its bulk, the animal is almost ephemeral, its legs and trunk dissolving into the rocky formations around it.
Nolan's capacity to absorb the world around him and reconfigure it according to his own sensibility extends beyond the confines of his native Australia to the plains of Africa; from his representations of legendary figures of Australian history and Greek mythology to icons of the animal kingdom.