Beautiful Minutiae

Across a storied lifetime of art making, Margaret Olley’s (1923-2011) flower paintings – predominantly painted through the 1960s – remain some of her most beloved work. With a palette of greens and burnt oranges, Banksia (1970), exemplified her ability to capture a subject in a warm, painterly style without sacrificing detail. In 1964, artist and […]

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A Natural Intimacy

In her Brisbane school days, Margaret Olley (1923-2011) was ‘always rushing around, quite rebellious, doing her own thing. She wasn’t particularly academic, so she wasn’t interested in any of that.’ It was at this time that encouragement from a particularly supportive art teacher, Caroline Baker, helped spark Olley’s interest in art making – a realisation […]

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Still Alive

When Jean Bellette (1908–1981) painted this modernist still life in the kitchen of her newly-acquired weekender in Hill End, she could not have foreseen the legacy she was creating for the arts in Bathurst. Her painting won the inaugural Carillon City Festival Art Prize in 1955 and was the first work acquired for the Bathurst […]

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