MARGARET OLLEY

Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane
Private Collection, Melbourne
Private Collection, Sydney
Australian and International Fine Art, Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne, 8 September 2004, lot 95
Private collection; purchased from the above

The first years of the 1960s marked Margaret Olley's rise to success. She won a series of prestigious art prizes - the 1962 Helena Rubenstein Portrait Prize, the 1962 and 1963 Redcliffe and 1963 Bendigo art prizes, and Finney's Centenary Art Prize 1963, judged by the then doyen of art education, Sir Herbert Read. It marked the beginning of a close friendship with the reclusive Ian Fairweather, and to top everything off nicely, her 1962 show at Brisbane's Johnstone Gallery was a sell out. Exhibitions in Adelaide, Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra and Toowoomba followed. She also expanded her art interests to include painting the human figure, those of Aboriginal women being among the most successful, as seen in Zillah (Standing Nude). She combined this new interest with her abiding love of still life. In this painting the model holds a basket of fruit, and a vase of flowers is in the background. In two related paintings of Zillah of this time, Zillah and Reclining Nude, fruit, jugs and flowers are likewise introduced into the backgrounds. The artist's attention, however, was very much focused on the rich brown colours of her model's skin, which had an obvious appeal as the artist grew in assurance and achievement. In the catalogue book to her 1996 retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, curator Barry Pearce noted: 'The colour in her work became more confident, and underpinned by stronger compositional design, although over the years a concern for the flat picture plane would become progressively supplanted by one for the form and weight of objects set within three-dimensional space.' ¹

The beginnings of these changes are happily apparent in Zillah (Standing Nude). While the play of light is used to create the feeling of form for the body, the background tends towards the flat patterning of colour, a delightful and intimate backdrop for the subject.

1. B. Pearce, Margaret Olley, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 17