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Lot Essay
The basis for much of Nolan's work, no matter where it was painted or what subject it examined, was the Australian landscape and all that it entailed. As such Nolan studied and explored the essence of that landscape. On the numerous exploratory trips that he made to the interior of Australia the artist made various sketch studies of the plant life of the different regions, along with the multitude of drawings he also made photographic records of the country and its flora, when he later painted he returned again and again to these all important accounts as the source of relaying the essence of the Australia he wanted to describe. "But this is no mere botanical travelogue. Rather it is an obsessive dialogue with floral form and the density and variety of colour it produces." (T.G Rosenthal Sidney Nolan, London.2002.p.211.)
This work was born out of the Desert Thorn paintings that date from the late 1940s. They render plant life that is uniquely Australian; these are not the soft and gentle plants of Europe but are, despite their beauty and uniqueness, hardy, angular and sharp, evolved so as to withstand the harsh natural conditions of the unrelenting native terrain. In Planta Nolan expertly conveys, in what by the early 1950s had become a more stylistic manner, the fundamental nature of such plants and evokes a sense of the eternal in such vegetation. Nolan commented "I saw the flowers springing up in Central Australia after they had lain dormant in the sand for twenty years. The pitiless wasteland throws up this extraordinary garden - like the Paradise Gardens of the Islamic peoples. Like Milton, I would like to inhabit Paradise." (quoted in T.G Rosenthal, opcit.p.207)
This work was born out of the Desert Thorn paintings that date from the late 1940s. They render plant life that is uniquely Australian; these are not the soft and gentle plants of Europe but are, despite their beauty and uniqueness, hardy, angular and sharp, evolved so as to withstand the harsh natural conditions of the unrelenting native terrain. In Planta Nolan expertly conveys, in what by the early 1950s had become a more stylistic manner, the fundamental nature of such plants and evokes a sense of the eternal in such vegetation. Nolan commented "I saw the flowers springing up in Central Australia after they had lain dormant in the sand for twenty years. The pitiless wasteland throws up this extraordinary garden - like the Paradise Gardens of the Islamic peoples. Like Milton, I would like to inhabit Paradise." (quoted in T.G Rosenthal, opcit.p.207)