Audio guides - Margaret Olley: The Art of Flowers

Margaret Olley (1923 – 2011)
Delphiniums and cherries 1976
Oil on board, 122 x 98 cm
Private collection, courtesy Phillip Bacon Galleries
© Margaret Olley Art Trust

Transcript

This exhibition celebrates Margaret Olley’s favourite subject – the beauty and joy of flowers. Olley dedicated her career to exploring the endless possibilities of humble, domestic objects combined with colourful, textural and sculptural arrangements of cornflowers, delphiniums, calendulas, hydrangeas, poppies, marigolds, flannel flowers, hippeastrums and more.

The Art of Flowers brings together some of the finest examples of Olley’s highly acclaimed floral paintings, spanning five decades, from public and private collections.

The exhibition includes some of Olley’s early explorations of still life via a rich and expansive palette, and this was despite modern art trends of the time. From here, this early work flows the story of her extraordinary life and the evolution of her practice, both entwined and driven by her singular vision and her obsession to paint.

Albeit a humble subject, The Art of Flowers is a splendid offering of rarely seen paintings by Australia’s most celebrated painter of still life.

Margaret Olley in the garden, Farndon, Brisbane c.1950 Photographer Unknown

Transcript

In an interview with biographer Meg Stewart, Margaret Olley once reflected on the use of colour in her work by saying:

"As far as putting colour into my work, I was particularly influenced by the Bonnards and the Matisses that I’d seen while I was away. Sunlight is what Bonnard is about. He paints light and life. Matisse and Bonnard instinctively put colours together so they sing – pink with a bit of red, or just a surprising black dot placed somewhere. It’s magic."

As an emerging artist, Olley established herself as a landscapist. In 1947, the year she graduated from East Sydney Technical College (now National Art School), Olley won the Mosman Art Prize, judged by Lloyd Rees, with a landscape painting called New England landscape 1947. In the following year she had her first solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, opened by Russell Drysdale. Of the 26 works in the exhibition, only 4 of them were still lifes, the genre she would later, almost exclusively, dedicate her career to.

In 1949, amidst the intense media attention around William Dobell’s portrait of Olley winning the Archibald Prize, she travelled to England for her first overseas adventure. In Europe, the young artist visited galleries and saw, for the first time, paintings she had only ever seen as reproductions in books – works by the likes of Cézanne, Chardin, Manet, Monet, Matisse, Bonnard and Degas.

In France and Italy, in 1951 and 1952, Olley explored the process of making monotypes as a painterly extension of her drawings. She used the process to showcase her beautiful attention to detail through expressive contour line drawing – as seen in the earliest work in this exhibition, Still life 1951.

Olley returned to Australia in 1953, following the unexpected death of her father. The Brisbane she returned to was still a large, sleepy country town, a far cry from Paris. These were difficult times for her as a young artist – she was mourning the loss of her father and struggling with alcoholism. By 1959, Olley’s family was so convinced her drinking would destroy her painting career, they opened an antique store for her in Brisbane, offering an alternative career path. In the same year, at the age of 36, Olley checked into a clinic and attended Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), commencing what would become a lifelong commitment to sobriety and the philosophy of AA.

Around this time, Olley began to experiment with colour, which was unfashionable in Australian art of the time. She was inspired by the work of the modern masters she had experienced in Europe, as seen in the flat, colourful French style of Agapanthus and tiger lilies c.1958.

Margaret Olley 1923–2011
Hippeastrums and watsonias 1964
oil on board
Private collection © Margaret Olley Art Trust

Transcript

In the introduction of Olley’s 1964 Johnstone Gallery exhibition catalogue, artist and art critic James Gleeson wrote:

"I can think of no other painter of the present time who orchestrates his or her themes with such undiluted richness as Margaret Olley. She is a symphonist among flower painters, a painter who calls on the full resources of the modern palette to express her joy in the beauty of living things."

For Olley, sobriety inspired a renewed energy for painting and she explored colour with vigor, as seen in works such as Tiger lilies 1962, Hippeastrums and watsonias 1964 and Basket of calendulas 1967.

The flowers in these early paintings were gathered from gardens throughout her neighborhood, their availability dependent on the season. The combination of flowers and arrangements have a casual, hand-picked aesthetic that she maintained, even in later years, when she was sourcing flowers from florists in inner-city Sydney.

By the 1960s, Olley’s solo exhibitions were predominantly flower studies and still life paintings infused with brilliant pattern and colour. In 1962, she had her first sell-out show at Brisbane’s Johnstone Gallery, which doubled the previous sales record for any Australian female artist.

Financial independence through her art allowed Olley to invest in property. In 1964, Olley purchased her now-famous Duxford Street home studio in Paddington, Sydney, although it would be some years before she lived in the home on a permanent basis.

Margaret Olley with Sam Hughes c.1970s Photographer Unknown

Transcript

In an interview with biographer Meg Stewart Olley once said:

“People used to ask me where I lived. ‘I live in a basket,’ was all I could think to answer. I was on an eternal run between Brisbane, Newcastle and Sydney, with studios, paints and clothes in three places … I moved around with a big, flat-bottomed basket … that would carry anything, including baked dinners.”

During the 1970’s, Olley lived between Brisbane, Sydney and Newcastle, and travelled extensively to places such as Indonesia, Hong Kong, India, Iran, Turkey, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and more.

One of the places that she would carry her basket to, filled with paints and brushes, was the home of her friend, the late-artist David Strachan, who had died tragically in a car accident in 1970. Olley used his home, a short walk from Duxford Street, as a studio for much of the 1970s. It was there, on the landing at the top of the stairs in his Victorian terrace, that she painted Hawkesbury wildflowers I 1970. In the 1960s, Strachan had introduced Olley to the beauty of these wildflowers when they picked huge bunches of them together on a visit to Russell Drysdale’s home at Bouddi, near Gosford. Olley described her interest in painting wildflowers as being an appreciation for their form.

The structure and texture of flowers became a focus for Olley during the 1970s, as seen in works such as Delphiniums and cherries 1976 and Hydrangeas 1970. She simplified the compositions and celebrated their sculptural form with generous attention.

In Marigolds and limes 1975 and Wallflowers and lemons 1977 objects have been arranged, like actors on a stage, and intentionally bathed in directional light. In each of these compositions an object, in one a cloth and in the other lemon leaves, interrupt the surface edge of the furniture, creating the spatial relationship between viewer and objects.

In 1975, Olley had her first solo exhibition with Philip Bacon Galleries. This marked the beginning of one of Australia’s longest-running agent-artist relationships. The exhibition was a great success and was, memorably, the Gallery’s first sell-out exhibition.

Margaret Olley outside her Duxford Street home studio c.1980 Photographer Unknown

Transcript

Olley’s Duxford Street home studio was both site and subject matter for painting for nearly 50 years. Christine France, historian, curator and friend of Olley’s once said:

"Her house was the living part of her art … She was exactly where she wanted to be in the midst of her art and her life, and it was here that she produced some of her best work."

The 1980s was a difficult decade for Olley. Towards the end of the first year, the Olley family home in Brisbane, Farndon, burned down and, along with it, countless early artworks by Olley and the treasures of several generations of her family were destroyed. Then, in 1982, Olley lost both her mother and the love of her life, Sam Hughes, who had been living with her from the mid-1970s.

The loss and sorrow can be read in her still life paintings from this period as deeper, somber tones imbue her palette. In Cornflowers c.1978/82 and Cornflowers, green pots and lemons 1982 deep, dark colours contrast against the striking blue of her favourite flowers, cornflowers, and the selection of green objects. In these arrangements there is a feeling of echoing space, an emptiness and, although the subject hasn’t changed, we are reminded that the artist is looking from her own place of feeling and emotion out onto the everyday world around her. The subjectivity of the artist’s view is signaled by her compositional choices.

For a short period of time in 1985, Olley moved from her Duxford Street home to another in nearby Gurner Street. The move may have acted as a circuit breaker to the feeling of emptiness at Duxford Street following Sam’s death. In the same year she travelled again to Europe, a trip that almost cost Olley her life. She fell extremely ill with meningitis, which had a permanent impact on her balance and mobility.

Olley was back in Duxford Street by 1988, and her famous home studio was once again the subject matter for her painting, as seen in Bottlebrush and paintbrushes 1993, Yellow lupins and mandarins 1996 and Yellow lupins and coffee pot 1996. In each of these paintings, Olley’s masterful arrangements of flowers and objects are set against recognisable interiors of her home studio, the dining room and the yellow room, respectively. Both interiors have been re-created here in the Margaret Olley Art Centre.

The following decade, the 1990s, was a period of great public recognition for Olley, beginning with a retrospective exhibition of her work at the S.H Ervin Gallery of the National Trust Centre in Sydney. This coincided with the publication of the biography Margaret Olley, by art historian, curator and friend Christine France. In 1990, Olley founded the Margaret Hannah Olley Art Trust to pursue her philanthropic interests, and in 1996, the Art Gallery of New South Wales presented a major retrospective of her work.

Margaret Olley in her studio in Sydney, NSW, Australia at 9.22am on December 13th, 2005 Photo: R. Ian Lloyd.© The artist

Transcript

Olley was famous for quoting her friend Frankie Mitchell by saying:

"Hurry, hurry last days.’ I really have to hurry and get on with things. Yesterday’s gone. Who knows about tomorrow? Today is what is important. Now is the moment, seize it."

In 2001, at the age of 78, Olley plunged into depression and, for a period of about six months, was unable to paint at all. The resilience and persistence she displayed in her thirties, when recovering from alcoholism, once again shone through as she sought medical support to eventually recover, paint and work towards new exhibitions.

The interiors of Duxford Street, and all the objects that filled it, were Olley’s primary subject matter for nearly 50 years, and in her final decade of life there was no exception to this. Red cyclamen in the blue kitchen 2008 depicts a simple arrangement of objects with cyclamen bursting with colour. The light streaming in from the window balances the Matisse poster hanging on her blue kitchen wall. Olley faithfully painted what she saw, but in these later years her lack of mobility and her declining health forced her to paint more from memory than she ever had before. Decades of looking at her subject matter meant she could paint the colour, pattern, texture, form and light just as she could when she was there in the room with her subject.

Gum blossom 2007, Gloriosa and green apples 2010/11 and Poppies and checked cloth 2011 each depict a still life on the marble benchtop in Olley’s green kitchen, with her Henri Fantin-Latour poster on the wall in the background. Collectively they are joyous examples of Olley’s endless fascination for everyday objects and flowers.  

In 2011, when Ben Quilty was making his winning portrait of Olley for the Archibald Prize, he was amazed by the number of paintings Olley had on the go. To this she responded, ‘I’m like an old tree dying and setting forth flowers as fast as it can, while it still can.’ She was painting faster and more freely than ever – hurry, hurry last days. There was no time to waste. In fact, before she went to bed on the eve of her passing, Olley spent her last hours finishing a painting for her next scheduled solo exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries. She lived to paint and she painted right through to the end.