Above : Sidney Nolan Pretty Polly Mine 1948, Ripolin enamel on hardboard, 91 x 122.2 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased 1949 © The Sidney Nolan Trust, all rights reserved, DACS/Copyright Agenc
Spring in Sydney is glorious. Sunshine, waves breaking against the shore, birdsong in the air — everything conspires to draw you outdoors. It takes something rather special to lure me inside. An exhibition alive with colour, perhaps.
Recently, I visited Nolan: Origins at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Bringing together more than 150 works spanning the late 1930s to 1953, the exhibition traces the formative years of Sidney Nolan (1917–1992), one of Australia’s most distinctive modernists, and offers a glimpse into a restless, passionate spirit.
What first caught my eye was the exuberance of his colours, the freedom of his brushwork and the almost childlike innocence of his imagination. There are echoes of Matisse’s brilliance, Chagall’s dreamlike poetry and the fractured perspectives of Cubism. Yet what stayed with me was something less easily defined: an unguarded sincerity beneath the dazzling surface.
That apparent innocence was far from artless. Inspired by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and the experiments of Picasso, Paul Klee and other modernists, Nolan sought something beyond mere resemblance. Intuition and imagination became his means of reaching a deeper truth. He once spoke of his willingness to sacrifice painterly convention in the pursuit of emotional expression. Behind the seeming spontaneity of his brushwork lay an unwavering conviction.
Nolan came of age in the shadow of the Great Depression and the Second World War. His Self Portrait of 1943 is particularly haunting. Wide, startled eyes stare out from a face marked with vivid colour. Paintbrushes stand like weapons; a palette becomes a shield. Standing before it, I could almost hear a low, anguished roar rising from within. In that young, defiant face, I saw both the darkness of war and an artist’s fierce resolve to defend his independence of spirit.
No one, however, lives beyond the reach of history. The upheavals of an age shape not only individual destinies but also the thoughts and emotions of those who inhabit it. Nolan’s paintings bear witness to this intimate exchange between the individual and his times — a profound, deeply personal record of how each comes to shape, and be shaped by, the other.
This relationship finds perhaps its most compelling expression in his celebrated Ned Kelly series. Nolan immersed himself in historical accounts and visited the sites of Kelly’s exploits, yet his interest lay beyond the facts. In his imagination, history became legend. He saw the nineteenth-century outlaw not merely as a rebel, but as a tragic “rebel poet”.
The solitary figure in his black iron helmet, riding across the vast Australian landscape, carries both the defiance of rebellion and the fear of flight, shadowed by an almost inevitable sense of tragedy. Nolan himself had deserted the army in 1944 and lived under an assumed name. Perhaps that experience gave him a particular affinity with Kelly’s fate. Freedom and confinement, resistance and consequence — these contradictions inhabit images that can appear disarmingly innocent, even absurd, yet remain profoundly unsettling.
In Nolan’s landscapes, I found another kind of freedom, one deeply rooted in the Australian earth. Red soil, golden plains and brilliant blue skies unfold around tiny human figures, almost lost in the immensity. The more expansive the landscape, the more palpable the solitude; the more intense the colour, the deeper the feeling beneath it.
I am especially drawn to the way Nolan reimagines landscape through colour, allowing the world as seen and the world as felt to become one. There is something deeply moving in this radiance. His landscapes are never merely scenery. They become repositories of history and memory, places where the imagination wanders and the spirit finds a sense of belonging.
Nolan later travelled to Europe and made his home in Britain, yet Australia remained a powerful presence in his imagination. To venture far is to seek; to look back is also an act of love. Freedom, after all, need not mean freedom from attachment.
His personal life was no less complicated, marked by contradictions, passion and turmoil. Artistic freedom offers no immunity from life’s difficulties, nor was Nolan’s pursuit confined to its simpler pleasures. Love, anguish, uncertainty, wounds and longing — all found their way into his art, transformed into colours that have outlived the moments from which they sprang.
What makes Nolan: Origins so compelling is the opportunity to witness an artist finding his own voice amid the upheavals of history, the complexities of experience and the enduring pull of his homeland. His subjects and styles evolved, but his commitment to emotional truth, and his refusal to let convention limit the imagination, remained constant.
As I moved through the exhibition, a line from a song by the Hong Kong rock band Beyond kept returning to me:
“Forgive me for being wild at heart, for loving freedom all my life.”
It seemed to capture something essential about Nolan’s artistic spirit.
Perhaps true freedom is not the absence of history’s burdens or fate’s constraints, but the ability, amid all life’s complexities, to think for oneself, to feel without pretence and to speak with courage.
That is what I found most moving in Nolan’s paintings, and what has stayed with me long after leaving the gallery.
