Deutscher and Hackett

Painted with rich and warm hues describing a myriad of textures, Olley’s still-life paintings celebrate the abundance of worldly pleasures. Unswayed by fluctuating fashions, her art has remained steadfastly intimate and personal, romantic in feeling and humanist in subject matter. Mirroring the directness of her personality, her works portray humble and prosaic scenes, executed with an untiring vitality. Olley’s sprawling Paddington house and studio provided an immediate and never-ending source of inspiration, crowded with countless ceramic vessels, and exotic objets d’art collected from distant lands, bouquets of fresh cut flowers and piles of glistening fruits, a place her friend Jeffrey Smart described as ‘that beautiful magic cave of beguiling chaos which is her home.’¹ A luminous medley of red and green, the casually arranged Backgammon and bottlebrush presents a new permutation of well-loved motifs and visually stimulating objects that have graced previous canvases over many decades of dedicated painting as a daily ritual.
 
A classical still life combining inanimate decorative objects, fresh flowers and fruit, Backgammon and bottlebrush suspends a moment in time, the possibility of an afternoon spent indulging in pleasant pastimes. Centred around a striking arrangement of crimson bottle-brush blossoms in a modest glass jar, Olley has carefully orchestrated a chromatic dialogue between her objects. This visual conceit links the bottlebrush’s distinctive spiky combs and pale green leaves with the pointed designs of the open backgammon games board in the foreground; a jug with a lustrous red enamel coating completes the loop. Counterbalancing the radiant warmth of these objects, Olley has painted surprising highlights of green on the cedar table-top and has used an array of blue pigments to depict a white pedestal bowl containing apples.
 
Placed slightly off-kilter and angled invitingly toward the viewer, Olley’s backgammon board can be found in several more strictly thematic still-life compositions from the 1970s, including Games table, 1977 (private collection). Open, in an unplayed state, this backgammon board is far removed from those within rowdy tavern scenes of Dutch 17th-century genre paintings which Olley may have seen on her frequent visits to European museums. An exceptionally popular game at the time, backgammon boards were a common motif in gambling scenes, becoming a symbol of wasted time and moral laxness. By contrast, the objects within Olley’s paintings impart no special meaning beyond the creative possibilities they afforded in shape, colour and lighting.
 
First travelling to Europe in the late 1940s, Olley’s later life was increasingly punctuated by habitual trips to European capitals to visit major retrospective exhibitions of masters of still life painting such as Pierre Chardin, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Cézanne. In 1995, Olley travelled to Paris with the antique dealer, Brian Moore, to see a large retrospective exhibition of Cézanne’s work – the first of its kind since the 1930s. With a direct artistic inheritance from this father of modern art, who claimed to be able to shock Paris with a single apple, Olley has included in this still life an arrangement of these fruits, painted as his had been, with bold and unmodulated brushwork. Similarly dispensing with the strict rational perspective of a single viewpoint, Olley’s Backgammon and bottlebrush dynamically directs the viewer around this small corner of the artist’s magically transformed domestic sphere.
 
1. Smart, J., ’A Tribute’ in Pearce, B. et al., Margaret Olley, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1996, p. 11
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH