Andy Olsen is at Peace with the World

Andy Olsen is at Peace with the World is a piece of experimental writing composed while researching the Andy Olsen Archive. Section I and II are fictional musings before I knew any details of Andy’s history. Section III is a copy of the biography pasted to the back of one of Andy’s paintings. Section IV and V are paraphrased anecdotes and information gleaned from conversations with people who knew Andy.

Andy Olsen is at Peace with the World

A great city emerged after decades of decay

Light-filled and full of good people

Animals walked the sunlit streets and flew amongst its reflective glass buildings

Nobody suffered here. Everyone was cared for. It was the only city of its kind

The air smelled of cedar and ocean

All who visited wanted to stay and the people who remained were kind and understanding

The artist Andreas Vilhelm Olsen was born in Denmark. He was an only child.

Olsen had remnants of a Danish accent after he moved to New Brunswick. People often thought he was German or maybe French. He moved to Canada when he was 12, from the Copenhagen suburb of Brondby. His father, Jurgen, was an amateur naturalist and worked at the Saint John port for many years as a facility manager. Andy too worked at the port as a logistics assistant. He wasn’t mathematically inclined, but the job was straightforward. He spent his days inputting information about a ship's arrival, making note of the offloaded containers, and where in the port they were temporarily situated. It was not interesting work, but he enjoyed having a place to go 5 days a week. Most of the day he spent outside, walking amongst the different coloured metal containers while hearing the seagulls from above.

Andy would spend time at the West Side library which had a small selection of art books. William Blake’s collected illustrations, a Riopelle book which he wasn’t that interested in, a small book on Surrealism although the pictures were in black and white, and several exhibition catalogues from the region. Andy would sit at a communal circular table and slowly turn the pages, reading some of the accompanying words but mostly he looked at the pictures.

On the weekends Andy made paintings in his kitchen studio. He had no formal training in the arts. He had met the artist Bill Martel at the library one day. Bill had sat across from him on one of the communal circular tables. Andy, although usually reserved, was excited to see the lanky, pale man with his grey trench coat across from him looking at the library’s Surrealism book. He started up a conversation about art and the beauty of Saint John.

Martel encouraged Olsen to work with oils on board. Martel also worked on primed Masonite. Martel's explorations into fantastical landscape, especially his abstractions of the Saint John skyline most likely influenced Andy. In the early 1970s, Olsen began making works on board using a surrealist technique called decalcomania, where he would press together two surfaces covered in wet paint. When separated, they produced a honeycomb-like texture that he would use as a starting point to see fantastical forms and visions. He most likely read about this technique used by Max Ernst and Oscar Dominguez in the Surrealism book from the library.

The only artist Andy had regular contact with was Bill. Although he was reclusive, Martel was well-known in the Saint John community. They decided to go to an exhibition opening together at the Saint John Art Center and it turned out to be the only time Andy attended an opening there. He found the people unrelatable. They bounced around the room and spoke unnaturally. However, he met Fred and Sheila Ross at the opening and later told Bill how kind he thought they were.

He travelled to Fredericton several times to go to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. He enjoyed seeing the Dali paintings no matter how ridiculous they were and was drawn to the work of Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash. He found most of the other art uninspired. He questioned how this art got here and where the money came from to get it all. He wondered where the paintings and sculptures of the Indigenous people were.

Andy sold his paintings at two places. One was at Angela’s Gifts in the Lancaster Mall and the other was at Attic Antiques on Douglas Avenue. Liz Isaac, the co-owner of Attic Antiques, remembers Andy bringing in unframed paintings on board every so often. She recalls him being polite and quiet and was happy to have his work in their new shop above the gas station. During the 7 years they were at that location, Isaac sold 10-15 pieces of Olsen’s work for modest amounts.

Andy Olsen cared about people and would volunteer at the food bank one evening a week. He usually worked in the back room, organizing non-perishables into boxes for individual families but sometimes would work in the front serving people dinner. He enjoyed the short conversations with people who were there to eat a hot meal.

He lived with his elderly parents in a garden suite off the main house on the west side of Saint John. His parents had a cat in their home named Brandy that Andy was fond of. Andy found a tortoiseshell cat injured at the port one day and took her home. He bandaged the cat's wounds and fed her some carrots and chicken. He spent two weeks nurturing the cat and once she was healed, he brought her to a neighborhood park where he had recently seen another cat. The tortoiseshell cat however followed Andy home and became his companion for 12 years. Andy would donate money to the animal shelter whenever he could. Andy liked cats and the idea of a cat suffering caused him much grief.

Andy cared about the environment. He was a member of the Conservation Council and attended their monthly meetings at the community center on Fairvale Boulevard. He would spend most Sundays walking the marshes near Saints Rest beach making sketches. Sometimes he would take his parent's car to Red Head to paint. He didn’t often paint from observation but rather from his imagination. But the feeling of being outside he liked. He would get lost sometimes in the woods and enjoyed being closer to a place that felt natural, where he would encounter the crows and the black and orange caterpillars. When he did paint outside Andy liked when people stopped and looked at what he was working on. Some would stop and just look, and others would say nothing but raise their eyebrows and nod at the same time. Others said, “Getting there”, or “How lovely”. A man stopped to look one day, and casually said, “It's not very good is it”. The man walked off before Andy could think of anything to say back. It made Andy smile, knowing that the man was right, but also knowing that at home he had many good paintings.

Andy didn’t care about money. He gave it away if he had extra. He had no savings and didn’t buy much except food for himself and his cat, gas for his parent's car, his share of the mortgage of his parent's house, and painting supplies. He didn’t go out and he didn’t buy new clothes often. Andy would meet his friend Leo every Saturday at the Coffee Mill, a diner inside the Manawagonish Mall next to Kmart. Leo was a hermit and lived in the woods between Manawagonish Road and the highway, close to the gravel pit. Leo would always ride his loud scooter to meet Andy and was always covered in dirt and grease and all his clothes were the same tone of dark grey. Andy and Leo would sit and read their newspapers and not say much to each other. Andy would buy Leo lunch every week and it made him feel good that he could do that for his friend who he liked very much. One Saturday, Leo didn’t show up to lunch. Andy ate alone and the next week he read in the Telegraph Journal that Leo had been killed. He was shot in the back near his home in the woods. Andy suspected who might have done it, but no one was ever charged.

Like his father, Andy was a naturalist. He felt most comfortable outside amongst the rocks and the trees. He loved animals and took an interest in observing plants throughout the different seasons. Being a painter meant that he could share with others what he saw and felt in nature. He didn’t think of what he did as important, but he did take it seriously.

Andy Olsen made paintings that resemble the movement of nature; slow consistent energy vibrating in all directions. His paintings tell the story of his love and respect for the natural world. Andy's paintings are both sad and optimistic, with the building materials of his utopian world made of desiccated leaves and refracted light pushing its way through the fog and smoke of Saint John’s many factories.

III

Andreas Vilhelm Olsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and spent his early years sailing.

He came to Canada in the 30’s and during World War 2 served overseas with the Canadian Engineers.

For the past 25 years, from his studio overlooking the sea, he has produced Compositions and Impressions of many varieties; always an “original” in the final analysis.

His unusual technique emerges in an exercise in art suitable for all ages. One 10-year-old was inspired to write an essay on an impression titled “The Shell”, which he saw as “an ear in three parts listening on what Nature has to say.”

The driving force to share his Compositions and Impressions of Nature is almost fanatical. He admires Chinese art. His media is oil.

Mr. Olsen’s works appear in private collections in England, the United States, Australia, and Canada. He has exhibited at various galleries in the Maritimes, including the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton; also Montreal and Ontario; was awarded a “First” at the Atlantic National Exhibition in 1967. Two of his historic Compositions are in the Webster Collection at the New Brunswick Museum, Saint John- “Lower Woodstock before Flooding for the Mactaquac Dam” and “Martello Tower, Saint John West, N.B.”.

Paula M. was 17 when she received an Andy Olsen painting as a gift from her parents for graduation. The painting remains in her possession today.

We spoke on the phone and later she emailed me the above biography of the artist, including a photo of Andy. This bio and photograph were on a piece of paper attached to the back of one of Andy’s paintings in Paula’s collection.

She knew Andy because he worked as a draftsman at her father’s engineering firm in Saint John. Paula remembers going to Andy’s house on the west side and going to his attic studio. The walls were covered with his paintings. He was prolific. Paula remembers Andy’s wife’s nickname was “Tiny” because she was petite.

Paula’s father organized an exhibition of Andy's work at their house in Milledgeville in 1968. Many families with one of Andy’s paintings most likely acquired them from that exhibition.

Andy was a quiet man with a faint Danish accent. He served in the army during World War 2.

I visited Andy’s home on Center Street on the west side. I was told that he built it by hand and when I was invited in by the current owner, I could see details of hand craftsmanship.

The more people I met that had paintings by him, I would hear stories about who Andy was. He was kind and gentle but also opinionated. He was maybe a communist, or perhaps sympathetic to communist ideas. He enjoyed sunbathing in the nude. He had no children so when he and his wife Tiny died the niece he disliked inherited the house. He was prolific and people remember visiting him with hundreds of paintings stacked in his attic studio. I was told he was having an affair with the police chief’s wife. His wife was not healthy and apparently was a result of her being born weeks premature, hence her nickname “Tiny”.

Before Andy died, he told Tiny that he was not going to die alone. That evening, he went to bed and did not wake up.