The Extreme Environment

He lives in London and goes home only for visits, but Sidney Nolan, 46, remains as Australian as the emu or the lyrebird. In his country's bustling art world, he has the widest range and the most lyrical touch. "The common denominator of all of us Australian painters," he says, "is a concern with the figure in a landscape. It seems a peculiarly Australian trait, and I think it gives a poignancy to all our work."

Next week Nolan's latest paintings go on display at the Marlborough Gallery in London, where Nolan has had one triumph after another. The U.S. will get a chance to know him in the next twelve weeks, when London's Royal Ballet tours the country with The Rite of Spring, for which he designed the sets.

Close to Melville. Nolan describes the framework of his art as "deep space" or "man in an extreme environment." He could just as well be defining the history of Australia itself. Like the U.S. Wild West, Australia's vast mid-continental frontier has been a breeder of legends. And always the theme is man against terrifying odds. It may be drought, heat or the devastating loneliness of an outback town; the protagonist may be a gold digger, convict, explorer or the legendary Aussie bandit, Ned Kelly, defying a continent in his own way.

"I sometimes feel closer to Herman Melville than to anyone else," Nolan says. "As in Moby Dick, he and I are juggling the same ingredients: the single protagonist, the mysterious adversary, the all-powerful elements." Nolan regards these themes as obsessions, and he is glad to be obsessed. Every artist is bombarded by a chaos of images and clues about what to paint; the obsessions are "in a sense a net to trap these clues."

The Nolan Nylon. Nolan's subject matter may be rugged, but his paintings almost always turn out to have an unusual delicacy--the happy result of a technique that Nolan developed by using his wife's discarded nylons. "It is a process of putting on layers of color and then burnishing them off with the stocking until I get the translucent quality I want."

Nolan's Young Monkey was inspired by a recent trip to Africa, but "in painting Africa I am certainly not ditching Australia. There are the same unfolding perspectives, vista upon vista. What I've done is to put the animal instead of the human in the landscape. The monkey seems, like Ned Kelly, to be a creature who has come out of the bush." In Explorer, Rocky Landscape, the protagonist looks as if he were attached, centaurlike, to his camel, as if the two were "united for survival." A century ago, explorers and traders introduced camels to Australia, and a few wild ones can still be seen, bringing to the continent "an archaic. Biblical feeling." It is the man's nakedness that fills the painting with a feeling of doom. In mid-Australia, stripping off clcothes is legendarily the last crazed, automatic act of a man dying for lack of water in a wasteland--an act the Aussies laconically call "doing a thirst."

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