Unique colour creations exclusively available each month!
Colour of the Month Theme for 2024 - Flowers in Artwork
December 2024 - Olley: Winter Flowers (1965)
Margaret Hannah Olley AC (24 June 1923 – 26 July 2011) was an influential painter from Australia who specialized in still-life and interior scenes. Born in the town of Lismore, she went on to study art in the cities of Brisbane and Sydney. Not limiting herself to painting, she also explored theatre set design during her career. She associated with renowned artists like Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale, and Donald Friend. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1948, and one of the pieces from this show, a self-portrait titled "Portrait in the mirror 1948", became part of the Art Gallery of NSW's collection. After this, she traveled to Europe in 1949, where she studied in Paris and held her first exhibition there in 1952. On her return to Australia, she was commissioned to paint murals and she also painted landscapes and still lifes.
Margaret Olley’s Winter Flowers, 1965 comes from a richly fertile period in her career. Her exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1961 was met with public and critical acclaim and she also garnered many notable prizes between 1962 and 1965, most notably the Redcliffe Prize (twice), the Perth Helena Rubinstein Portrait Award, and the 1965 Bendigo Art Prize with Summer Flowers, the larger companion piece to Winter Flowers. Over the next few years, her solo exhibitions were anchored around still lives which served as a stable inspiration allowing her to remain apart from the late-Modernism trend then dominating the art world. Olley worked on multiple paintings at a time in order to maintain balance and give herself time to appreciate all the elements of each work. She was said to paint in a symphonic manner and indeed her works are rich and detailed. Although Olley claimed she was not a botanical artist as such, Winter Flowers clearly features snowcap daisies, orange honeysuckles and Chinese lanterns, all depicted with an attention to detail that enables their easy identification.
Socknado - 80% SW Fine Merino / 20%Nylon
350 meters / 385 yards per 100 gram / 3.5 oz skein
Gauge: 27 - 32 sts / 4 inches (10 cm) US 1.5 - 3 or 2.5 - 3.25 mm
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