Elephant 1965

Sidney Nolan made this artwork, Elephant, with brown and olive green gestures, it looks like it came into being intuitively. I can imagine him, standing with his brush, making his mark, stepping back, and then diving back in to make another mark. I can sympathize with his artistic process, how he might have been thinking while he made the artwork. It’s so tactile, you can almost feel the texture of the bristles. Those thick applications of paint, dragged across the surface, give the elephant its volume and a sense of movement. Look at that horizontal yellow line—it disrupts the darkness, right? It also evokes the feeling of a body of water at sunset. Nolan was in dialogue with other painters who were concerned with similar issues of light and texture, like Bomberg and Auerbach, all inspiring one another's creativity. Painting is an exchange of ideas across time. It allows for multiple interpretations. A single artwork holds so much ambiguity and uncertainty.