{"id":629,"date":"2011-01-06T03:10:40","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T03:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15bytes12\/2011\/01\/06\/don-olsen\/"},"modified":"2025-11-09T23:39:18","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T06:39:18","slug":"don-olsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/don-olsen\/","title":{"rendered":"Don Olsen: Music in Paint"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The visual arts have regularly been considered with regard to their relations: in the heyday of oil painting literature was the next of kin. In contemporary art the closest cousins are philosophy, and her bastard child, theory. But for a few decades in the middle of the last century, when nonobjective painting reigned supreme, the visual arts could be mistaken for music \u2014 which meant it was a good time, if there ever is one, for a talented musician who has found his career cut short by throat cancer to turn to the visual arts. In the 1940s, at the age of 35, Don Olsen put down his violin and picked up his paintbrush, and became, with Doug Snow and Lee Deffebach, one of the godparents of abstract art in Utah.<\/p>\n

At the end of last year, in time to celebrate the centenary of the artist\u2019s birth, the UMFA unveiled in the Great Hall a retrospective look at 10\u00a0large works by Olsen. The earliest dates to 1957, and the latest to just before the artist\u2019s death in 1983. Despite shifting modes of surface treatment, from juicy expressionist work to hard-edged coolness, the paintings here share a common compositional tension that gives the whole ouevre a personal voice.<\/p>\n

Though Olsen\u2019s voice was personal, it was not particularly original. He made frequent trips to New York, developing his abstract vocabulary either by active study with artists like Hans Hofmann, or simply by observation in the many galleries that sprung up in the post-war boom. He returned to his home state a proselytizer if not a pioneer, influencing a generation of painters that came after him.<\/p>\n

Olsen may have put down his violin but as these paintings aptly convey, music never left him. His familiar forms and strokes, repeated within a work and from one piece to the next, are like the recurring motifs of a classical composer. His teacher Hofmann called it \u201cpush and pull\u201d but Olsen might just as easily have given his visual strategy of combating ground and planes musical terms:\u00a0piano\/forte,<\/em>\u00a0counterpoint, consonance and dissonance all come to mind. His paintings sing, whether with brass and strings as in the impasto work from the \u201960s, or oboe and bassoon in the weighted, hard-edge work of the \u201970s.<\/p>\n

Art these days does many things. We read \u2014\u00a0ad nauseam<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 how it questions, explores, interrogates and references.\u00a0Don Olsen: Abstracts<\/em>\u00a0from Nature<\/em>\u00a0reminds us it can also sing.
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\nDon Olsen: Abstracts from Nature<\/span><\/em>\u00a0is at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts through February 28.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The visual arts have regularly been considered with regard to their relations: in the heyday of oil painting literature was the next of kin. In contemporary art the closest cousins are philosophy, and her bastard child, theory. But for a few decades in the middle of the last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[4768,3348],"class_list":["post-629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-abstract-expressionism","tag-don-olsen"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/70.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 08:39:51","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98249,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629\/revisions\/98249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}