Sidney Robert Nolan biography

Sidney Robert Nolan (artist, was born on 22 April 1917 at Carlton, Melbourne, eldest of four children. His father was by then a tram driver and ran an illegal starting-price betting ring for which Sid became a runner and made a lot of money.

He attended the local State school on Brighton Road and Brighton Technical School before moving to Prahran Technical College. Attached to the department of design and crafts, he studied lettering and drawing, including for dressmakers and milliners. From the early 1930s he worked in several jobs including painting glass signs at Solaflex Illumination and designing layouts for advertising at United Felt Hats. During his employment he became intrigued by the properties of commercial paints, including gloss and spray enamel.

In June 1939 he held his first solo exhibition at his studio in a condemned tenement in Russell Street, Melbourne, but it yielded no sales. At Heide, Sunday Reed became Nolan’s lover and encouraged him to focus on painting.

In early 1945 his paintings were based on a close reading of historical and current texts.

During December the Reeds exhibited Nolan’s Kelly paintings at Maison de l’Unesco in Paris.

From 1954 to 1956 he completed a further series of Kelly paintings. The works were well received and sold to collectors, as well as institutions, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. They also drew on his experience of wartime loss, his brother having accidentally drowned.

In mid-1957 a retrospective exhibition of over one hundred and fifty of Nolan’s works from the previous decade was shown at London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery. The exhibition was well received by critics and confirmed his place as a painter of note.

Travel became Nolan’s weapon against creative and personal depression. Throughout his painting career it was the exploration of materials, techniques, scale, and, above all, the challenge of placing an object in front of a background, that obsessed him.

A prolific artist, Nolan gave several collections of his works to Australian museums and galleries. In 1974 he presented artworks in his Ern Malley and the Paradise Garden exhibition to the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Nolan’s seventieth birthday in 1987 brought a flurry of celebratory media attention and events. At that time Nolan was Australia’s most distinguished living artist, although he remained an elusive personality and controversial man. He was applauded for his ability as an artist to recreate and manage myths, but was criticised for his high-volume and sometimes uneven output. Sir Sidney died on 27 November 1992 in Westminster Hospital, London, and was buried in Highgate cemeteryFor many people Nolan’s Ned Kelly (1946) epitomises the myth of Kelly as an outsider and white man’s alienation in the Australian landscape. The work is arguably Australia’s best-known painting.

Nolan refers to his use of dyes. He mentions in particular buying some more aniline dyes in red, blue, yellow and black from Deans art supply store in Melbourne and that « the spirit ones are all that is necessary » as opposed to the water-soluble variety.  

One of Sydney Nolan’s most famous artworks is « Lagoon Wimmera » in 1943 and located in the National Gallery of Victoria. This is one of a series of pictures that nolan during the period when he was serving in the Australian army and stationed in the Wimmera district of Victoria. Or another one which is well know : « Little Dog Mine » in 1948, this is one of several paintings that Nolan painted on similar subjects , depictiong the hard, lonely life of Australian pioneers. Here the rough, scratchy quality of the brushwork vigorously suggest the barren, scrubby nature of the terrain. Another one, « Antarctic explorer » in 1964  , Nolan’s travels took him to areas as remote and inhospitable as the Antarctic. His paintigs , inspired by what he saw tjere, usually differ greatly in mood from his Australia scenes, not least beacause of the predominant colour range, cool blues and sombre blacks rather than warm colours suggestive of the heat of the desert.

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