Today marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of the influential painter Geoffrey Olsen.
Born Geoffrey Robert Olsen in Merthyr Tydfil on 4 November 1943. He was a pupil at Cyfarthfa Grammar School, and later attended Newport College of Art, the West of England College of Art, Cardiff College of Art and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich before teaching in Oxfordshire. In 1978 he joined Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) where he lectured in art and design and became Principal Lecturer in the Visual Arts. From 1997 to 2001 he was Senior Lecturer in Fine Art.
Olsen exhibited widely from the 1970s including exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Wales, the National Library of Wales, the British School in Rome and Florida International University. His work was also included in a number of group exhibitions, including “Painting the Dragon” at the National Museum of Wales, the “Wales Drawing Biennale 2000” at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, the 1992 National Eisteddfod of Wales in Aberystwyth, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Ikon Gallery, Camden Arts Centre, the Corcoran Museum of Art and other locations in Europe and the US.
Olsen’s artwork uses abstracted geographical forms and memory from the places he knew best, including Merthyr Tydfil, the Cotswolds, Rome, Florence and Miami. Together with painting, during his later life in Miami, he also worked on producing books in collaboration with the writer Jerome Fletcher using both hyper-text and conventional narratives.
Poet, art historian and critic Tony Curtis described his collaborative artist book with the bookbinder David Sellars, as “one of the outstanding artists’ books of recent years”. The book combined images of Florence alongside those of Merthyr Tydfil, using laser prints, screen-printing and acrylic paint on Khādī paper.
On retirement from Oxford Brookes he began a particularly fruitful period: he took up the post of Artist in Residence at Florida International University in Miami in 1996 and there responded to the very different light and landscape with the series The Miami Wall-Paintings (1996-97), and a new collaborative approach to book production, both in a conventional form and using hyper-text narratives with the writer Jerome Fletcher. In 1999 he was granted an Abbey Award in Painting at the British School in Rome. He returned to Florida to teach on the MFA course in Visual Arts.
Diagnosed with leukaemia in 2003, he continued to paint until his death in Gloucester 6 December 2007.
*I am unable to include copies of any of Geoffrey Olsen’s works as they are copyrighted. You can, however, see a number of them here….
https://artuk.org/discover/artists/olsen-geoffrey-robert-19432007