'She didn't care what anybody thought': Margaret Olley in five paintings

Five artworks to see at Margaret Olley: Australian Intimiste at the National Art School In 1945, Margaret Olley — one of Australia's most celebrated painters — graduated from the National Art School, then known as East Sydney Technical College, with first-class honours. Within two years the Lismore-born artist would win the first-ever Mosman Art Prize and join Sydney's post-war art scene, alongside artists like William Dobell, Sidney Nolan and Donald Friend. During her life she would hold more than 90 solo exhibitions; influence artists like Cressida Campbell and Ben Quilty; establish a trust to buy paintings for public galleries; and be painted for an Archibald Prize-winning portrait not once, but twice. Now, she's being celebrated with a retrospective at her alma mater, titled Australia Intimiste. The intimism of the title refers to the late 19th-century art movement where artists like Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard painted intimate, domestic scenes from which Olley gathered much inspiration. "She loved this place," curator Katrina Cashman says of the National Art School, where Olley began her career. "She spent her whole life working towards the pursuit of beauty. "She worked very diligently and worked very hard to maintain [her success]. She had her ups and downs. She had various health struggles over the years. She suffered from depression at times. "But she was relentless in that pursuit of her primary passion: beauty." Portrait in the mirror Olley painted Portrait in the mirror in 1948 when she was just 25, living on Sydney's Lower North Shore with her friend and fellow artist Margaret Cilento. Cashman describes it as a turning point in Olley's career: "She's really establishing herself. She's recognising that she needs a space away from the National Art School to create her own work." While she had graduated three years earlier, Olley was still a regular on campus, attending evening classes until the year she painted Portrait in the mirror. That same year, Olley held her first solo exhibition, in Sydney, where both the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria purchased works. "This painting is so special because it shows us who she is and who she's going to become," Cashman says. Portrait in the mirror is one of many self-portraits of Olley. "Her own image was something she could find solace in, and it expressed her interior world," Cashman says. The dressing room table in the painting is adorned with flowers, fruit and postcards of famous works of art. "[Portrait in the mirror is] the very beginning of her focusing on objects, on cherished items, and the classic still life study … but putting her own spin on [it]" Cashman says. "She loved flowers as much as she loved people — they were a visual language in themselves … [And] she's surrounded her image with these beautiful pieces of art that she loves." Spare bedroom In 1970, Olley painted Spare bedroom in her family home of Farndon in Brisbane's West End. "I love this work because it's actually a very rich interior," Cashman says. The room depicted — in a "rusty sienna brown" — was a kind of side room, leading to a sunroom out the back. "It's a painting of absence, but you get that feeling of presence," Cashman says. "Even the way the chairs are positioned — you get that feeling somebody's just walked out of the room. "You've got this beautiful, filtered light coming through from a window, presumably in the next room. You've got this feeling of spaciousness and air, like the space is well-ventilated, with a breeze flowing through it." Cashman admires the simplicity of Spare bedroom, compared to some of Olley's more densely populated paintings. "It has a lot to say about the idea of the intimate interior," Cashman says. It's a style of painting unlike the abstract art or large-scale paintings that were fashionable at the time. "Still life paintings were not de rigueur," Cashman explains. "So, I think [Olley] was out of step in some ways with a certain part of the art sector who would not have considered this to be contemporary art with a capital C. "But she persisted regardless. She didn't care what anybody thought of her work." Kitchen still life Olley would often paint in the evening with fellow artist David Strachan, who she met in the 40s. "[Strachan] believed that the night-time was kind of pregnant with creative possibilities," Cashman explains. "There's something happening in the energy of the night." After he died in 1970 in a car accident, she got permission from his sister to continue using his Sydney home as a studio, where, in 1976, she painted Kitchen still life. "It's a simple image," Cashman says. "We see the pots on the stove, the garlic, the onions, the kale, the salt and pepper, the accoutrements. We've got this beautiful dark blue panel at the back, which is the window to the evening sky outside." Cashman likes the "strange feel" of the painting. "It's slightly menacing with the knife. They're about to cut up the onions or they're about to do the cooking, but there's something about the way that knife is placed." The ingredients and utensils also seem to indicate there's a "person in that space" — a presence within an absence as in Spare bedroom. "I just love the energy of this painting, knowing it's painted at night, the stillness, the quiet, that moody blue sky," Cashman says. Homage to Manet Often, Olley would replicate the paintings of famous artists in her work, including 1987's Homage to Manet. She painted a bowl of cherries and a jug of blue flowers in her kitchen, where she pinned a postcard of French artist Édouard Manet's 1868-9 painting The Balcony and a poster-size version of the work's seated figure: Berthe Morisot, a painter who married Manet's brother Eugene. The Balcony itself was inspired by Spanish artist Francisco Goya's Majas on the Balcony. "It's a self-consciously devotional act to include these works [in her art]," Cashman says. "It's not a postmodern appropriation with any sense of irony. She's not poking fun. It very genuinely is an homage to these great painters that she knows and loves." Cashman also admires the painting's "extraordinary" use of colour, "the richness of the patina, the focus on the female protagonist, and the focus on the delicacy of the flowers". Incorporating famous artworks into her paintings was in some ways a means for Olley to work on her craft. "Transcription is a part of art teaching," Cashman explains. "It's a deliberate thing to be able to transcribe another person's work and learn from it." It was also simply a reflection of life. Olley's home was "completely strewn with images by other artists", Cashman says. "Margaret was continually being replenished and refreshed by [other artists' work]." The yellow room triptych Olley continued to paint until the end of her life. She was preparing for an exhibition when she died in 2011, at the age of 88. In her final years, she painted The yellow room triptych, a living room scene spanning 2.7 metres. "She's choosing yellow as the colour to represent sunlight and the colour itself emits this sense of light," Cashman says. It's that light the curator finds so compelling. "The sunlight coming through the window is bouncing off that wall on the right-hand side and glimmering across the gold in the Chinese screen, and diffuse light is coming off those lemons. "The energy and the mastery of colour is what makes [Olley] so special." The yellow room triptych draws together much of Olley's practice, like the paintings by fellow artists, including Dance by French artist Henri Matisse; and the precious objects meticulously arranged beneath the window. "We've still got that passage to the garden, just beyond, and that vibrancy of that green and the freshness of the light that's coming through and spilling onto the arrangement," Cashman says. "Then in the background she's got these very muted pinks and browns." Like so many of Olley's still life paintings, the space also feels lived in — like someone has only just left the room. "For me, that ripple in the fabric [of the curtains] suggests someone whose hand has just touched that," Cashman says. Margaret Olley: Australian Intimiste is at the National Art School, Sydney, until October 24.