Grace Crowley

Grace Crowley (pr: as in "slowly") (28 May 1890 – 21 April 1979) was an Australian artist and modernist painter.

Early life

She was born Grace Adela Williams Crowley on 28 May 1890 at Forrest Lodge, Barraba, in North-Western New South Wales. She was the fourth child of Henry, a grazier, and Elizabeth (née Bridger). At about the age of 13 Crowley's parents sent one of her pen and ink drawings to New Idea magazine and she won a prize, but her career as an artist was not wholeheartedly supported, sometimes even actively opposed, by her family. From 1905 until 1907, Crowley attended the Methodist Ladies College now MLC School, in Burwood, New South Wales.

Career

Crowley studied in Paris in 1927 with the Cubist André Lhote, and took part in Exhibition I in 1939, the self-proclaimed first show of abstract art in Australia. Others in her circle included Ralph Balsom, Dorrit Black, Rah Fizelle, Frank Hinder and her best friend, ceramicist Anne Dangar. "The Artist and his model" The subject of Crowley's painting is fellow artist Ralph Balson, painting an elegantly posed model on the roof terrace of Crowley's studio in George Street, Sydney. Revealing a disintegration of figurative forms and division of the pictorial space into decorative areas, this work signalled a growing commitment, shared by both artists, towards complete abstraction. In 1939 Crowley and Balson participated in the important Exhibition I at David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney which summarised the concerns of local painters of the 1930s, then moving towards geometric abstraction.