John Olsen, one of Australia's most celebrated artists, who won countless art prizes in a six-decade career constantly exploring and expanding the theme of landscapes, has died at 95.
Tributes to the painter who also applied his expertise to ceramics, tapestry and printmaking poured in after his son, Tim Olsen, revealed his father had died on Tuesday night, surrounded by loved ones and family.
"Apart from our First Nation artists, he changed the perspective and way that Australians looked at our magnificent landscape," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
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"He was a landscape poet to the end and a titan of the Australian art world."
Olsen was born in Newcastle in 1928 and grew to be a legend, winning the Archibald Prize in 2005 and the Wynne Prize for landscape painting and sculpture twice, in 1969 and 1985.
He was awarded an OBE in 1977 for services to the arts and made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2001.
Artists, playwrights and journalists paid tribute to the man who was at various stages described as "Australia's greatest living artist" and the "godfather of Australian art".
"Sad news. I doubt there's any Australian whose eye has not been caught by his work at some point," Hugh Riminton wrote.
Olsen was constantly drawn to images of Australia, with regular explorations of sun, water and Lake Eyre in remote South Australia.
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But he also spent years in Europe in the 1950s and '60s, drawing influence from Tachist artists Antoni Tàpies and Jean Dubuffet and capturing the colours and rhythms of village life.
"Soon after his return to Australia, he painted the exuberant Spanish encounter 1960, which encapsulates a vitality stemming from his experience of Spain combined with the pulsating activity of Sydney's inner-city life," according to a biography of the painter by Art Gallery of NSW.
"The series Journey into the you beaut country, created after his return in the early 1960s, is among his greatest poetical visions of place."
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His work is still revered today and will feature in Sydney's Vivid Festival next month in the animated artwork Lighting of the Sails: Life Enlivened, displayed on the Sydney Opera House.
Asked about his longevity in 2017, Olsen said there was no secret, crediting his "inner drive" to keep going and noting appreciation for the "untidiness" of the outback.
"Once you begin to appreciate that untidiness it becomes very, very beautiful in itself – and unique," he said.
"It's that kind of thing that I was endeavouring to do."
Amid the praise, Olsen received some harsh reviews during his career, including from one English critic who referred to a painting as "a cascade of diarrhoea", but the Sydney artist said negative commentary didn't bother him.
He is survived by his son, Tim, and daughter, Louise,
In a biography of his father published on the Olsen Gallery website, Tim noted that "death brings new life".
"This work is a celebration of human life and nature," he said, of one collection.
"Through melancholy there is subsequent rebirth and its reward is truth and substance in joy."
