John Olsen in High Street and Harry Wedge at Gabrielle Pizzi, 2006.

A hot September in Melbourne this year has brought two magnificent exhibitions out in full bloom. A review of these two special artists, whose work is characterised by the use of vibrant lines and mood alterning colour.

Two exhibitions showcasing the considerable depth and talent of John Olsen at Metro 5 Gallery and of the less frequently seen H.J.Wedge on show at Gabrielle Pizzi Gallery, both in Melbourne.

Results at Australian auction houses have proven that one of Australia's most prolific and sensational artists retains the market's positive sentiment. John Olsen's works have been steadily increasing in value for the past six years with his work reaching, $486,500 in 2002, a record price for a living artist at the time. This positive sentiment has carried through to the current exhibition, where many of the works have already sold. A walk to other galleries in High Street reveals that the market is still very picky, as few other works in the galleries I visited were graced with a sold sticker.

It is some time since Melbourne last hosted an exhibition of John Olsen's current work. Titled The Coorong - Unfinished Journey it was painted following a trip to a place that Olsen is particularly fond of, The Coorong, along the coastline of South Australia. The exhibition contains 18 new landscapes, wildlife paintings and a large mural installation.

Olsen's style hasn't changed all that much since it came to maturity in the 1960's, but that is not to say that it has ceased to evolve. Both Olsen and the late Fred Williams developed totally unique view of the Australian landscape. In many ways both artists managed to find a new intellectual idiom to express their most poetic visions of our breathtaking natural environment.

So, while the style is set, each and every painting is still a most difficult challenge to the artist. Olsen's style captures both the organic vitality of the Coorong as well as its tonal richness and the very complexity of life as it is viewed by the artist is fervently worked out as a graphic form, resulting in the visual vibrancy of each painting. Within every painting, Olsen's harmonic line captures and fuses bird life with the landscape leading to paintings that give voice to this, his most poetic vision of life in the Coorong.

The tonal range of these oil paintings tends to be dark and dramatic - while I am always surprised when I see Olsen paintings with dark hues, they are common to his oeuvre. The coastal landscape of the Coorongs influenced by thick southern clouds and fresh breezes dampens the colours and this is picked up faithfully in his paintings.

New Work by Harry Wedge

Harry Wedge is an artist that shows incredible sensitivity to both his present state and that or the Aboriginal people. While his paintings display boundless energy, transferred via the energy lines emanating from the heads of his subjects, his use of poster like colour is also a device to amplify our emotional response to his subjects.

It takes more than a passing glance at a HJ Wedge painting to realise the artist has no fear in portraying the serious social maladies afflicting many Aboriginal people in communities around Australia. Each painting is anchored around the personal experience of the artist - these are not bland social statements, but poetic complex compositions that both weep with the pain of individual suffering and somehow soar with the exhilaration of life itself. You don't have to go past books on Australian painting from the forties and fifties, works by Boyd, Perceval and Vassilief to see the ongoing sensitivity to suffering in our communities.

Violence and alcohol abuse are prevalent in most paintings, but only obvious to those that take the time to look at the subjects in each painting. Each painting has a horror to reveal - subjects vomit, shoot, beat or are beaten reflecting a life of suffering and pain. And yet the artist used cheery, upbeat colours and cartoon like waving lines that ripple across his subjects, all but disguise his real message.

HJ Wedge paints the present - these attrocities that we are viewing are events that happened recently and not to a previous generation. His work is both profound and captivating and deserves the most serious attention, for both the message and the startling skill of this artist.

By Martin Shub, September 2006