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Margaret Olley / Australia 1923–2011 / Boonah landscape 1962 / Oil on board / 59.5 x 74.5cm / Gift of the Margaret Olley Art Trust through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2012 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Margaret Olley Art Trust
Margaret OlleyBoonah landscape 1962
On Display: QAG, Gallery 11
Margaret Olley was deeply grateful when her friend, poet and art critic Pam Bell, invited her to visit Aroo Station at Boonah, west of Ipswich. This sojourn provided Olley with new subject matter for a number of landscapes and homestead portraits in the early 1960s.
Boonah landscape was inspired by the view of Roadvale and the distant McPherson Range, which Olley took in as she travelled to Aroo. There is an intense colour relationship between the hot sun and the red volcanic earth, and the colour tones of the grass in the foreground, the fields in the middle ground, and the road that sweeps towards the mountains in the distance.
Margaret Olley was born in 1923 in Lismore, New South Wales. Her family moved to Tully in North Queensland and to Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales before she was sent to board at Somerville House, a prominent private girls’ school in South Brisbane. There, with the mentorship of art mistress Caroline Barker, she was inspired to consider a career in art.
She enrolled briefly at the Brisbane Technical College and completed her training in 1945 at the East Sydney Technical College. Her first solo exhibitions were held in 1948, at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney and the Moreton Galleries, Brisbane. Olley’s growing popularity made her an attractive subject for artists, and William Dobell’s portrait of Olley in the 1948 Archibald Prize caused a sensation. In 1949 she travelled to England, studied at La Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1950 and she also travelled to Italy, Spain and Portugal. Olley held exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery, London and the Galerie Paul Morihien, Paris in 1952.
When she returned to Australia, Olley established herself in Brisbane, living at her mother’s home in Morry St, Hill End. In 1959 she opened an antique shop in the inner suburb of Buranda. She later purchased a terrace house and an adjacent former hat factory in Duxford St, Paddington in Sydney, which she renovated to use as her studio. This house became almost as famous as the artist herself, featuring richly coloured walls and packed with thousands of objects, many appearing in her still-life paintings. She retained the family home in Brisbane, although the house was sadly destroyed by fire in 1980, resulting in the loss of many of Olley’s early works, photographs, and objects from her travels.