Early Morning Interior I 1972

MARGARET OLLEY (1923-2011)

Early Morning Interior I 1972

oil on board
90.0 x 120.0 cm; 104.5 x 134.0 cm (framed)
signed and dated lower right: Olley 72
bears inscription to frame verso: "EARLY MORNING INTERIOR I"/ BY MARGARET OLLEY 1972

Provenance:
The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane
Private collection, Adelaide
Thence by descent, private collection, Adelaide

Exhibited:
Margaret Olley: Homage, The Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, 1-20 October 1972, cat.8

Reference:
This work has been catalogued by The Olley Project (courtesy of The Margaret Olley Art Trust & Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane)

Estimate: $80000 - 120000

Result Hammer: $95000

In November 1970, Margaret Olley suffered the loss of her friend and fellow artist, David Strachan (1919-1970), when he was killed in a car accident at the age of 51. Having met during the 1940s as students of Jean Bellette (1908-1991), Olley and Strachan forged a lifelong friendship.(1) The two artists travelled and painted together over twenty-five years, eventually living in the same Sydney suburb of Paddington.  Despite differences in style and temperament, Olley and Strachan shared a rare artistic affinity:

[Olley] and Strachan were as sister and brother to the subject of still-life, although their differences were as Walter Sickert described between the Nash brothers: one with his head in the clouds ‘as a poet should be’, the other as a child with his feet on the earth as ‘the painter should be’.  Strachan was the one with his head in the clouds, nudging his vision into the penumbra of the self-conscious … Olley’s paintings by contrast are celebrations of materiality.(2)

Olley approached Strachan’s family to ask if she might continue to paint in his vacant house at 163 Paddington Street.  Olley had often worked there alongside Strachan and wrote to his sister that she had ‘always loved painting there … just something about the place.’(3) Strachan’s furnishings had been left intact, such that the house became an enduring portrait in absentia of its departed owner. 

The eclectic interiors of 163 Paddington Street would provide the inspiration for Olley’s finest works of still-life from the 1970s.  Her paintings of this era are distinguished by a captivating sense of stillness and restraint, as seen in the present work, Early Morning Interior I 1972.  Olley presents a broad diagonal perspective of Strachan’s dining room on the upper floor of his Paddington terrace.  The interior depicted here is far from funereal: Olley presents a careful arrangement of objects both natural and man-made, which are backlit by the morning sun.  The fresh grapes in the foreground and golden foliage on the trees outside would suggest Olley painted this scene in early Autumn. Olley’s robust handling of paint allows her to capture varying surfaces with remarkable naturalism; from the dry, delicate fronds of wildflowers to the smooth, glossy hardness of glazed earthenware. The composition is unified through Olley’s restricted palette of greys, russet reds, yellows and browns. 

Olley’s still-lifes from the 1970s often bear a meditative quality: objects of domestic life are continually revisited in harmonious arrangements of colour and form.  As with other rooms in Strachan’s house, Olley painted numerous iterations of the dining room between 1971 and 1976 (see Figures 1 and 2). In a pattern of continual re-observation and re-presentation akin to Claude Monet’s Haystacks of 1890-91, Olley approached her subject at varying times of day, allowing her to capture palpably different ‘moods’.  As seen in (Morning Interior) c1973 and Afternoon 1972, Olley also relished the opportunity to experiment with the placement of objects and furniture in space. 

The vibrant naturalism of Olley’s paintings owes much to her technique, which is rarely discussed in the literature surrounding her work. As the artist explained, ‘I prefer to work direct from models or still life, have an actual thing there … [rather] than relying on one’s memory, which is a sort of risky thing. You can be more interested in the actual painting of whatever you are doing.’(4) The notion of working from a photograph was seemingly anathema to Olley. Instead, the preliminary idea for a composition would be sketched onto a scrap of paper or card (often an empty packet from her beloved cigarettes),(5) before being worked out in chalk on a prepared sheet of Masonite. Olley memorably described the process: ‘I prepare the ground like a coloured bone, then put on the oil and the struggle begins.’(6)

Though Olley insisted that her interest in depicting Strachan’s former home stemmed more from practicality than sentiment – ‘David’s house was convenient’ – it is easy to see why these paintings are often regarded as acts of memorialisation.(7) In this sense, they may be seen to foreshadow the more literal preservation of Olley’s own Paddington home some forty years later, at the Tweed Regional Gallery in Murwillumbah, New South Wales.(8)        

Footnotes

1. Pearce, B., Margaret Olley, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1997, p.13
2. Ibid., p.15
3. Margaret Olley, quoted in The Mystery of Things: Margaret Olley & David Strachan, Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre, Murwillumbah, 2016, p.12
4. Margaret Olley, quoted in Pearce, B., op. cit., pp.17-19
5. Christine France, quoted in Hawker, M. et al, Margaret Olley: A Generous Life, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2019, p.187
6. Margaret Olley, quoted in Pearce, B., op. cit., p.19
7. Margaret Olley, quoted in The Mystery of Things: Margaret Olley & David Strachan, op. cit., p.26
8. Taylor, A., ‘Margaret Olley’s Home on Display at Tweed Regional Gallery,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 8 March 2014

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