Margaret Olley: Home

An exhibition of paintings and photographs depicts the Paddington home of Margaret Olley as a living canvas for the late, great Australian painter.

For Margaret Olley, painting was like breathing,” wrote Sydney artist Ben Quilty in his tribute to the late great painter, published in the catalogue to the Margaret Olley: Home exhibition. Olley was born 1924 in Lismore, in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. One of Australia’s most revered and prolific painters, hers was a life devoted to art. Of the ninety-plus exhibitions of Olley’s work – spanning a career of more than sixty years – this was the first to focus on her home as the subject of her work.

Olley’s home of more than sixty years was Duxford Street, Paddington, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. She had bought the rambling property in the 1960s, renting its larger terrace house and the garden rooms for income while she annexed herself between them in the Hat Factory – a former milliner’s workshop. This allowed her the financial security to paint and entertain as she pleased.

For over half a century this would be her home, her studio and her muse. It was where she entertained around a large timber table she had brought from her mother’s Brisbane home. The place her friends – painters, writers, curators and critics – would come for a cuppa and a chat. The place where she died peacefully in July 2011.

Over the years Olley had painted many interiors and still life settings in her home’s rooms. Rooms she had painted in pomegranate, ochre and powder blue shades that she had mixed herself. Against them she arranged rugs and busts and flowers and fruit, on and around furniture of a kindly, weathered charm, beside windows where the light was to her liking. Then she spent her days, weeks, months capturing on canvas these delightful mise en scènes in her trademark daubs of oil.

Her house seemed not so much decorated as accumulated, more so with each passing year. “This was not a domestic home, this was an artist’s home,” recalls Christine France, a friend and art historian. “Mirrored sideboards reflected carefully chosen objects and great bowls of flowers. Laden tables were placed to catch a shaft of light. Wooden sheep, bowls of fruit and dried pomegranates, balanced in an ancient jug, were arranged on kelim-covered chests.”

Midday at Margaret’s Dining Table Steven Alderton, photograph, 2011.

Midday at Margaret’s Dining Table Steven Alderton, photograph, 2011.

The paintings in this exhibition, produced between 1972 and 2011, are curated alongside black-and-white photographs of the interiors by Robert Deane from 1975, and colour photographs taken in 2011 by Steven Alderton, the exhibition’s curator. Together, they document the passing years, the growing collections and the seasonal changes in light. By 2011, brushes and pigments and curious objects cover every surface, including kitchen benches. Certain favourite objects recurred in Olley’s paintings: an urn from the south of France, a Turkish teapot and a Poole-style pottery jug. “Lead actors in her plays,” observes the art dealer Philip Bacon in a video played at the exhibition, in which he touchingly walks through the home he had visited so often, for one last time, in tribute.

In another tribute, Steven writes: “Kindness, generosity and genuineness were what drew people to Margaret’s home. It was not merely a set for her painting; the things that surrounded Margaret in her home all had meaning and stories – that is what makes their appearance in the paintings even more special.”

All the tributes – by young artists and old friends, Cressida Campbell and Ben Quilty, Edmund Capon and Leo Schofield – are similarly moving. All talk of Olley’s home as a place of peace and quiet wonder, “like an antipodean curiosity shop,” says one. This exhibition is as much about these stories as it is about a house or a set of paintings.

Olley’s dear friend Barry Humphries describes her work as “painted poetry,” and the mood of her house is delightfully expressed in one of his tribute verses:

The rugs, the jugs, congealing cups of tea
The Chinese screen and old Matisse’s prints,
Cosier and richer than the QVB
Is Olley’s kitchen with its glows and glints.

Margaret Olley’s studio and elements of her home and collections will be re-created at the Margaret Olley Art Centre, housed in a purpose-built extension to the Tweed River Art Gallery on the New South Wales north coast, where Olley grew up.

hht.net.au

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Published online: 28 Mar 2013
Words: Peter Salhani
Images: Collection and Estate of Margaret Olley, Courtesy Philip Bacon Galleries, Jon Linkins, Philip Bacon Galleries and Estate of Margaret Olley

Issue

Houses, April 2013

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