Art of living under a shadow
After appearing on ABC’s Australian Story with his family and buoyed by the success of his recent memoir Son of the Brush, Tim Olsen has a newfound confidence. Writing his autobiography was about more than just getting the final product out there. The act of writing it in solitude over several years was an undertaking in practising art he had once thought he might never be capable of.
Olsen’s father, John, is one of Australia’s most famous, commercially successful artists. Now 93, he has an OBE, has won the Archibald Prize, his work has been hung in all of Australia’s most prestigious galleries and his Salute to Five Bells adorns an entire wall of the Sydney Opera House.
But being the child of someone often described as a “living legend” is not without its challenges. Olsen’s childhood took him from travelling Europe to living in a commune in rural Victoria with no electricity. The family was seemingly bounced to and fro by John’s search for inspiration and space to paint.
Since Son of the Brush was released, Olsen has been touched to receive letters from people who relate to what he’s been through.
“Some have said it has helped them realise that you don’t have to live under a shadow your whole life because, really, you are the one who has invented it, not the person whose shadow you are living under,” he explains.
“My father never wanted to hurt me. It was really people saying, ‘In 200 years they’ll be talking about him and not you.’ It was the narrative of the public. It was also my own self-invention of believing I’ll never be good at anything that created the storm in my mind.”
The imposing shadow of his father hasn’t stopped Olsen from achieving success in his own right. His gallery in Sydney’s Woollahra has been standing for more than a decade – no small feat in the competitive world of commercial art. He also represents more than 40 artists and has cemented himself as an art world identity and taste maker.
The Olsen family has turned itself into an Australian dynasty on the back of John’s success. Louise Olsen is the founder of Dinosaur Designs and a respected artist in her own right. Recently, Tim Olsen had the pleasure of hanging art by his niece, Louise’s daughter Camille Olsen-Ormandy, in the Woollahra gallery.
“It was wonderful. I represent three generations of Olsens and they are all talented,” he says of showing his niece’s work. “We are a true dynasty, and the great thing is that not everyone’s work looks like my dad’s.”
While the Olsens have achieved remarkable success, their relationship with money is perhaps not as straightforward as that of other successful Australian families. The cliché of the starving artist is a cliché for a reason. Even after finding success, artists often struggle to get paid. And Olsen witnessed his father’s inconsistent cash flow in his childhood.
He’s also blunt about the fact that Australia is not a country that particularly appreciates art. It is, in his view, one of the more difficult places in the world to make a living in the arts. “I remember my father making the huge sacrifice to send me to a good school. It’s kind of interesting – most people think an artistic family would send their children to public schools or international schools,” says Olsen.
His father, who attended St Joseph’s College in Hunters Hill, wanted his children to go to a private school and saw this as a particular priority for his son because he was athletic. Olsen attended The King’s School in Sydney’s west, where fees can now run up to $38,000 a year.
“Coming from a bohemian family, going to that school allowed me to understand the other side of society … I was with a bunch of country kids, having a very left-wing upbringing and going to a very right-wing school,” says Olsen.
“Dad was pulling out all the stops to try and afford it. He was famous but we still lived in a very philistine country. It was when he stumbled upon drawing frogs while doing an ABC series with a naturalist in Queensland that they became, kind of, his signature image. So, he ultimately, sort of, paid my school fees in frogs.”
Drawings of frogs became my dad’s signature image. So, he ultimately paid my (private) school fees in frogs.
When it came to sending his own son James to school, Olsen wanted to pass on the same opportunities he had enjoyed.
“There’s a lot to be said for the public school system, but these days the corporate world sort of speaks upon the school-tie system. I don’t want to say that private schools provide a better education than public ones, but there is still a bit of a club mentality to it,” he says bluntly.
“I think a lot of my clients are people I’ve got to know through going to a private school. But, ultimately, I am who I am. It’s me who made me who I am, not the school I went to. Certainly, King’s was a wonderful introduction to meeting great Australians who didn’t go to Aspen or Mykonos for holidays; they’d go home and fix fences and shear sheep. I love all that. It was not always Palm Beach. Growing up with people that were taught to have a work ethic from a very young age made a huge imprint on me.”
Another early memory that made an imprint was his first impression of a gallerist. He recalls being about eight years old when his father’s gallerist visited the family while they were living in the commune in Victoria.
“He had an amazing old Jeep, and he always had very glamorous girlfriends. And I thought to myself, ‘That guy has a great life … without owning casinos,’ ” he says with a laugh.
After finishing school, Olsen trained in art for seven years. He began to feel, though, that he didn’t have the temperament to be an artist, feeling it was a lonely occupation. It wasn’t until recently, writing the memoir, that Olsen overcame that sense that he couldn’t pursue a solitary passion.
“Seeing the way gallery owners lived, I thought it was full of interesting people, long lunches, and they had a great lifestyle without being an artist,” he says.
The long lunches, he adds, nearly killed him. He was an alcoholic, enabled by wine-soaked gallery openings and business meetings that seemingly couldn’t be conducted any other way than over a bottle.
Business suffered during the dark years when he was frequently drunk, he says. In his memoir he admits to “living like a Gatsby millionaire” while having a fairly modest cash flow.
In the book, Olsen discusses some of the other gallerists who have influenced him, including Roslyn and Tony Oxley, who run Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9, where he worked for a time early in his career.
Tony and Roslyn Oxley are heirs to the (former) Waltons department store and Bushells tea fortunes, respectively. Olsen writes of respecting their somewhat philanthropic approach to showing art, showing unprofitable but experimental and exciting exhibitions more often than the profitable ones. “I respect their vision (and deep pockets),” he writes.
The Oxleys weren’t the only businesspeople Olsen would learn from. The mining magnate Andrew Forrest and the chef/restaurateur Jamie Oliver are two others. Olsen says he learned from both the importance of being surrounded by the right team.
“Jamie Oliver came to the gallery one day to do a big lunch for the press. He had all these people turn up with the seafood, the rice, the gas, the pans and everything. They laid out this huge table to sit 60 people in the gallery. Jamie rocks up an hour before and cooks this paella, which usually takes hours to prepare. His team meant that he could basically turn up and push his wooden spoon around the pan and it was all done.”
Olsen saw the same kind of delegation after forming a friendship with Forrest.
“Having spent time with Andrew Forrest and his wife Nicola at Minderoo, seeing the way he was able to juggle mining, running a cattle station and his philanthropy concurrently, knowing that he had people at the other end of the phone or out in the field all also inspired to work for him,” he says.
Lessons like these, says Olsen, are as important in art as in any line of work. He has seen many, many galleries come and go in Sydney alone.
“The Olsen name itself is a brand, which I was very lucky to inherit. But it’s still about getting out there, in the same way that a music producer wants to turn a musician into a rock star,” he explains.
Gallerists must turn themselves into a brand but also turn their artists into brands and build them up. That’s why art prizes, social media and public relations are all important.
Building up artists benefits them personally and it benefits the gallery, and Olsen gets immense pleasure out of seeing them flourish.
“The first thing an artist needs is stability. I always say the first thing you have to do is buy yourself a house or an apartment. Give yourself some security where you know that’s where you will live. Secondly, try to establish a studio where you can sustain a constant presence to be able to build up a body of work. Nothing makes me prouder than to see how a lot of my artists have ended up buying property and studios.”
Olsen’s investment philosophy also has property at its core. He says he “sticks to his knitting”, investing in things he understands – art and property.
“I always invest in my own buildings. I bought my two buildings, which are adjoined to each other, in one of the most expensive suburbs in Australia, in Woollahra. I bought a big old warehouse, which is an anomaly in the area, and the house next door. I’ve been offered five times as much as I paid,” he says.
“The great thing about my buildings is that I am able to make them work for me. I’m making a lot more money making them work for me than I would be renting them out.”
His art collection, meanwhile, could rival some of Australia’s finest. And it is perpetually increasing in value. “If you’ve been following the art auctions, it’s incredible what a lot of postmodern, postwar art is achieving,” he says. “I’ve got a wonderful lithograph by Russell Drysdale, who was my godfather. I’ve got little Brett Whiteley portraits of Bob Dylan and Shakespeare. I’ve got Fred Williams guaches. I’ve got other more mid-career artists like Nicholas Harding. There are lots of artists where it’s a difficult thing to go from being a popular young artist to a sturdy midcareer artist to a master in old age. Not many artists traverse all three tiers.”
His advice for investing in art that will appreciate is the same advice any sensible investor in any asset would give: know the market and know what you are putting your money into.
“See what people are buying at auction. Find out what the top galleries are. Find out who their most followed artists are, who their rock stars are. Even if you buy a little work, you’ll already have a brand attached to it, someone who has got a name.”
However, he doesn’t think art should ever be thought of as a pure investment.
“Ultimately, the most important thing is to like it. I think there’s a lot of karma attached to buying art for love, not investment. I actually don’t like the words ‘art investment’. If it turns out to be an investment, fantastic. But you can buy with the principles of art investment in mind, but buy only out of love in the moment.”
Olsen is philanthropic, having established the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize and the School of Art & Design at UNSW. He’s a patron of The King’s School Art Prize, gives to the Art Gallery of NSW restoration department and to the National Gallery of Australia.
“Art is art. It’s not just investment. It adds substance to our house, to our living environment, to a corporate environment. It’s about the hidden conversation we have with the outer world,” he says.
Nothing makes me prouder than to see how a lot of my artists have ended up buying property and studios