Margaret olley prints on canvas

Biography

Margaret Olley is one of Australia’s most significant still-life and interior painters. She drew inspiration from her home and studio and the beauty of the everyday objects she gathered around her. Many of her paintings feature arrangements of fruits and flowers, set amid the pottery, art and exotica of her travels. A widely-recognised figure in Australian art, she was a major benefactor to public institutions, and the subject of two Archibald Prize winning portraits.

Born in Lismore in northern New South Wales, Olley studied art at Brisbane Technical College then at East Sydney Technical College (later the National Art School), graduating with first-class honours in 1945. In the late 1940s she worked as a set designer in the theatre, including on productions of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée with fellow artist Sidney Nolan. Other artists in her circle included Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend. With Friend, she was among the first artists to paint in the Hill End area near Bathurst in western New South Wales, producing works such as Backbuildings 1948.

In 1948, Olley held her first solo exhibition at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries, from which the National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of NSW both purchased works. A self-portrait from that show – Portrait in the mirror 1948, now in the Art Gallery of NSW collection – shows her surrounded by the things that would preoccupy her throughout her career, as well as paying tribute to past great masters of art, seen in the postcard reproductions, which would become another frequent feature of her work. The same year, she was the subject of William Dobell’s Archibald Prize winning portrait – Margaret Olley 1948 – which brought her unwelcome public attention.

Olley left for Europe in 1949. She lived for a while in France, during which time she studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, went on weekend painting excursions with fellow expatriates Davi

Etching House for Margaret Olley limited edition fine art etchings, prints, Giclee prints and works on paper. Lay Buys welcome up to 12 months at 20% deposit, no fees.

About Australian Margaret Olley AC, AO 1923 – 2011

It is with great sadness that today the 26 of July 2011 the world of fine art has lost the darling of the art world.

Only weeks ago we personally had the pleasure of spending time with Margaret Olley in the Presence of Charles Blackman, Garry Shead, Jason Benjamin. Margaret Olley was as always her charming and ever so delightful self with a smile that would melt you in a moment.

Margaret spoke happily about here work and love for color, she also spoke about how she doesn’t like Telephone companies and digital things.

Margaret Olley AC, AO 1923 – 2011, passes way to day 26 July 2011, a truly sad loss.

Etching House buy, sell and trade original paintings, etchings, by Margaret Olley.

Margaret Olley AC, AO

Born in Lismore 1923, Margaret Olley is renowned as one of Australia’s most prized interior and still life painters.

Demonstrating a fierce disregard for trends and fashions, Olley’s exquisite arrangements of flowers, fruit and objects seduce the viewer with their technical virtuosity and inherent grace. Her arrangements are always elegant, the objects always beautiful.

Complexities of space and light are rendered with consummate skill. Olley’s subjects are almost always from her own home – itself famous as an exquisite work of art. She first came to public attention as the beguiling subject of Dobell’s winning Archibald portrait in 1948, and these days is regarded as a national treasure. In 1997 her work was the subject of a major retrospective organized by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

“Her work is a continuing celebration of the great tradition of painting; of the delight in color, in form and the textures of feeling and emotion that can be ex

As Australias most celebrated painter of still life and interiors, Margaret Olley was also known for her forthright, no-nonsense attitude to life and art. She was an opinionated advocate for the traditional tenets of painting holding views sometimes controversial in the face of theory-based contemporary art forms that rose to prominence during her lifetime. Like her contemporary Jeffrey Smart (1921-2013), Olleys primary concerns in painting were visual rather than conceptual. It was the effective execution of the formal elements of picture-making composition, light, volume, and texture, that most occupied her creative process. As for the metaphorical associations we may draw from her paintings, like Smart who was notoriously difficult to pin down on the subject of meaning in his work, Olley was also happy to allow her visually sumptuous paintings to speak for themselves. The present work is no exception.

Of the three masters from history that Olley held most dear Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) and Paul Czanne (1839-1906), it is the influence of Czanne that is most readily perceptible in Calendulas and Bush Lemons. Czanne, who is credited with modernising the still life genre and elevating its lowly status, used the arrangement of natural forms to explore positive and negative space, while incorporating abstract components into his otherwise illusionistic paintings. Areas that lack definition, exposed fields of canvas, and flat planes that tilt forward to bend the rules of perspective sit alongside conventional still-life elements in his ground-breaking work.

Margaret Olley, a keen traveller with a voracious appetite for viewing paintings by the masters she admired, had many opportunities to apply her perceptive eye to the works of Czanne and analyse their secrets. As a skilled painter with an innate sense of composition and space, it is by no accident that Olley places gauzy fabric in the foreground of C