Generous spirit who celebrated life

MARGARET Olley was almost certainly the best-loved figure in the art world of Sydney, if not of Australia.

In a milieu in which disparaging people behind their backs is almost a reflex, it is remarkable that she was almost never spoken of without affection.

Her generosity in personal relations is attested to by the number of her friends and the many acquaintances who became very fond of her.

She was equally generous in her gifts to Australian public galleries. Works she gave ranged from the work of Donald Friend and Edgar Degas to sculpture and painting from India.

Margaret Olley was born in 1923 in Kyogle, a NSW district in which her family had been pioneers. Later they lived in Brisbane, and Olley moved to Sydney during the war years and enrolled in art classes at East Sydney Tech, now the National Art School, where she was taught by Jean Bellette and others and met fellow artists such as David Strachan.

Over the following years she came to know almost everyone in what was then a much smaller and less factional Sydney art world, and her own career as an artist was interwoven with her relations with these contemporaries.

She was first brought to notoriety as the sitter for William Dobell's Archibald-winning painting of 1948. (Russell Drysdale had painted her in the same year.) This year's Archibald Prize was again awarded to a portrait of Olley, only a few months, as it turned out, before her death.

Olley's own pictures are mostly still lifes -- objects arranged on tables -- but they are not studies in formal relations and composition so much as celebrations of fruit, flowers and colour.

The objects she painted retain their sense of involvement in the fabric of domestic life and, in fact, some of her most memorable pictures are of interiors: her house became an elaborate set for her art, a series of rooms filled with the things she liked to paint, and which are assembled in her pictures in different configurations.