Richard Olsen, 229 Wall CCXXIX (229), oil, 2015

Art as Experience:
Richard J. Olsen and the Vietnam War

On view: May 28 – September 5, 2020
Guest Curator: Andrew Hayes

READ MORE about the life and art of Richard Olsen in Lake Oconee Living here
or in Athens Banner-Herald here

As a helicopter pilot during the early years (1962-1963) of the Vietnam War, Richard Olsen experienced war almost daily, including being wounded himself by ground fire during a combat assault near Tay Ninh; yet his joy-of-life personality allowed him to see and appreciate the world and people around him and not merely dwell on the battles that raged. When he was there, Vietnam had not been ravaged by war and the bombing and defoliating that came later. To him, even in the midst of war, the moon and sun still rose and set each day, seascapes and landscapes were beautiful, and workers were going about their lives in their fields and villages. His memories and images clearly included the sights and experiences of war, but they also included the lands, villages, cultures, and people.

Later in art school, Olsen was encouraged to use his experiences in Vietnam for content in his art. He assumed that artists painted what they saw: people, places, or events; thus, he translated his experiences into pictures of what he saw, using varying degrees of abstraction and realism. These works included images similar to other wartime art—mainly figural or symbolic works showing the meanness, arbitrariness, horror, harshness, and devastation of war, often with graphic details. However, even though he was producing it, that art did not match his gregarious, energetic, enthusiastic, out-going, and optimistic personality. He had to find other content, or some other way to represent his war memories.

He began using the 602 Club—a local hangout in Madison, Wisconsin—as content for his new paintings. The students, art faculty, and their friends met there each day for rowdy gatherings that often lasted well into the night. He painted what he experienced in the club, using pictorial images, sometimes modelled after famous paintings by other artists, to represent those experiences.

Upon taking his faculty position at the University of Georgia in 1969, Olsen continued his figural and compositional styles from his 602 Club paintings. Yet, his uncertainty about what to paint continued to trouble him. This was a time in universities when the military and the Vietnam War were not comfortable subjects, nor even accepted by his colleagues. Abstraction, with little or no figural content, was the style-of-the-day. While he was not sure what to paint, he was skillful in using his media and materials and in painting both realistic and abstract forms. He decided to rely upon the art cliché, “If you don’t know what to paint, paint your studio wall”. That decision set his artistic direction—he would make paintings of content composed of images and objects inside his studio. It would take 20 years of painting content inside his studio before sources outside his studio were introduced and his mature artistic production began, allowing authentic representation of his Vietnam wartime experiences.

During these intervening years until his mature paintings emerged, Olsen had to learn to make “paintings” of his experiences and not the “pictures” of people, places, objects, or events that he had been making. He knew that his early war images were naked, raw, physical, graphic, and private. He had not been able to communicate his war-related emotions, perspectives, or experiences through them—only pictures of war. Olsen saw that Byron Burford, in his paintings, was able to present someone drenched in valor and misery without using photographic realism. He also remembered that when Jack Kerouac or Ernest Hemmingway wrote about adventures, they were able to get inside of the adventures and describe them so that readers were only remotely aware of the writer as a witness. Olsen wanted to reach that standard in his paintings: to “get inside of his Vietnam adventures and paint them in such a way that viewers comprehended the adventures as experiences while being only remotely aware of the painter”.

To begin the journey, Olsen adopted operating principles: color is what comes off the canvas and not what is put on; distill immediacy; replace passion with time; make flat planes that cover, hide, and keep inside while always being present. Experiences must be objectified, not “subjectified”—the objective rather than subjective frame of reference was essential. He wanted his paintings to show the anguish and other emotional effects while not touching and communicating war itself; covering it up and approaching it from an alternative perspective with more distancing.

Olsen eventually achieved that standard in his mature Wall paintings, represented in this show. By inventing and adopting a symbolic vocabulary and using those symbols consistently in his work, he was able to compose paintings that expressed war as experiences with all of their actions, horrors, and meaning without using their visual images.

Art Historian Anthony Janson said, “Richard Olsen is the grand master among artists who depict war as their subject. Through his invented and adopted symbols and his mastery of aesthetic principles, he allows viewers to approach the images comfortably, perhaps even while enjoying the aesthetic beauty, until they can recognize and interpret the complex symbols to determine the experience that he is describing. In my judgment, no other artist has developed and adopted a model for describing experience using visual art that matches Olsen’s.” Through Olsen’s paintings, others can know the War through symbols, as it is known by Olsen, who actually was there as a transport helicopter pilot.

To make his paintings, Olsen begins by making a collage, or Calculation, to compose a story (an allegory) that he wants to tell. He pieces together parts cut from photographs from his archives or from new ones made of his ever-increasing collection of paintings and other images and objects on and around his studio. Using a compositional geometry and grid system that he devised, he constructs a design that will guide his painting, much as other artists use studies. While painting, he usually strays from the Calculations to follow inspirations for making the story more vivid, to introduce an image from his memory, or merely to achieve some aesthetic purpose.

Gallery Slideshow:

Wall CXV (115), The Rain

1993

Collection of Hon. Laura Jack

Wall CLXXIII (173), China Night

1975-2005

Collection of Hathia and Andrew Hayes

Wall CXXIII (123) State 2, View from the Shawnee

1995-2008

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCXLVIIa (247a), Telegram from Madame Nhu

2017

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCXXIX (229) State 3, In Country

2015

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCXLVIIb (247b), The Letter

2017

Collection of Hathia and Andrew Hayes

Wall CCXXXV (235) State 2, 658 and the Iron Triangle

2015

Collection of the Artist

Wall CX (110), Nui Ba Den

1994

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCLX (260), Eye of Cao Dai

2019

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCXLIV (244), The Landing Zone

2016

Collection of the Artist

Wall CXXXVIII (138), The Sun and the Moon

2000

Collection of the Artist

Wall CLXXVII (177), Breakthrough 2

2004

Collection of Hathia and Andrew Hayes

Wall LXVII (67) State 2, Breakthrough

1990-2005

Collection of the Artist

Wall CXLIX (149), Voyage to Indochina

2001

Collection of Hathia and Andrew Hayes

Wall CXXXIV (134) State 2, Turn and Bank Day and Night

2004

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCXLVIII (248). Mirror

2017

Collection of the Artist

Wall LXXVI (76) State 2, Mekong Sunrise

1991-05 

Collection of the Artist

Wall CXLVIIIa (148a)

2000

Collection of Dianne Penny

Wall CCXLIIIa (243a), West Wall

2016

Collection of the Artist

Wall CXXXVI (136), Night and Day

1998

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCXLIIIb (243b), East Wall

2018

Collection of the Artist

Wall CLX (160), The Hill

2001

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCLIIa (252a), Battleground

2018

Collection of the Artist

Wall CXXXV (135), Mekong Night

1999-2004

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCLIV (254) State 4, Outpost with the ARVN Scarf

2018

Collection of the Artist

Wall CXCVI (196), Sunset on the South China Sea

2007

Collection of Anthony F. Janson

Wall CCLIII (253), Studio 6 (Thunderbird)

2018

Collection of the Artist

Wall CLXVI (166), The Stranger

2002

Collection of the Artist

Wall LXXXIX (89), Jungle Sunrise

1992

Collection of the Artist

Wall LXXXVI (86), Sisyphus

1992

Collection of Anthony F. Janson

Wall CLXX (170), View to the Sea

2002

Collection of the Artist

Wall CCXLIX (249), Tilted Horizons

2017

Collection of the Artist

Wall LXXXV (85), Over There

1992

Collection of the Artist

Wall XCVII (97), Night on the Delta

1993-2006

Collection of the Artist

Wall CIX (109), Cao Dai, Moon, and Rain

1994

Collection of the Artist

Wall CXLII (142) State 2, Enter the Night

2000-2006

Collection of Hathia and Andrew Hayes

Wall CXVI (116) State 3, Nui Ba Den 2

2010

Collection of the Artist

Wall CLVc (155c), Ha Long Bay, Tempest, Marinus

2005

Collection of Hathia and Andrew Hayes

Wall CLXXIXa (179a), North Window

2004

Collection of Hathia and Andrew Hayes

Artist, Richard J. Olsen

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