Alan Oldfield; artist and teacher (Australian)
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: Joanna Mendelssohn
http://www.umilta.net/oldfield.jpg
Artist and teacher. Born Sydney, December 30, 1943. Died
Sydney, October 2, aged 60.
ALAN Oldfield's crisp abstract paintings burst on the Sydney
art scene in the late 1960s with their pure colour and clean
lines. They combined a hedonist sensibility with the
austerity of hard-edge abstraction.
Oldfield's journey from those early celebrations of life to
a later meditative style was characterised by a joy in good
food and wine, a love of the great traditions of art and
music, and a deep religious faith.
The boy who came to Sydney's National Art School in 1962
was, by all appearances, a most unlikely art student. He was
the son of a fitter and turner, who had gone to East Hills
Boys High, which did not give him the chance to study art.
The school had, however, given him a brilliant young Latin
teacher, Bill Collins (known for his love of film) who
inspired him with a lifelong love of classical culture.
The other source of encouragement was his mother, who
persuaded him to enter the children's section of the
Rockdale art prize when he was 11. He won.
In contrast to the rigidity of school, the National Art
School introduced Oldfield to a world of freedom. The
camaraderie between staff and students and the
self-conscious bohemianism of inner Sydney took him forever
away from the culture of the suburbs.
He enjoyed a robust social life, which included several
spectacular appearances at the annual artists' ball. He once
recalled walking down Oxford Street as dawn was breaking,
wearing nothing but glitter under his coat.
He was interested in art, ideas and experimentation, and his
work soon attracted critical attention. In 1966, the year he
graduated, Oldfield held his first solo exhibition at
Watters Gallery.
It was no surprise that in 1968 he was one of the younger
artists selected for the ground-breaking Field exhibition at
the new National Gallery of Victoria. At this time he was
one of a small group of radical artists exhibiting
self-consciously New York-influenced abstraction at Central
Street Gallery.
He also wrote for Other Voices, a short-lived journal of art
and ideas. In 1995 he was to write the catalogue
introduction for Wendy Paramour, the only woman in the
Central Street group, to ensure that her art was not
forgotten after her death.
For Oldfield the change of direction from abstraction to
figurative art came in 1970, when he travelled to the US and
Europe.
He always loved saturated colour, and his initial aim was to
see the great survey exhibition of Matisse in Paris. But in
Europe he was confronted with the power and beauty of the
whole Western tradition.
As a young man he had found spiritual solace in the
Anglo-Catholic traditions of Sydney's Christ Church St
Laurence, and this encouraged him to look more to the great
aesthetic traditions of medieval and renaissance Europe.
His partner, Jim Davenport, was an academic, which led to
Oldfield visiting Cambridge, where he later claimed he
disgraced himself at high table at Kings College.
His paintings of this time included a series of chairs --
empty, but awaiting the presence of a human body. One work
was of a meticulously painted book placed on a chair, the
subject was Caravaggio. He had seen the definitive
Caravaggio and the Caravagisti exhibition in Florence. The
17th-century Italian master was to remain one of his future
aesthetic guides.
Oldfield returned to Italy in 1974, to Rome. Here he had the
freedom to paint and further study renaissance and baroque
art. He began to appreciate the beauty of subtle tones and
of sculptural forms shown in paint.
His growing interest in medieval mysticism led to Oldfield
researching The Revelations of Divine Love, by English
mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich. In 1985 he began to paint a
series of works based on her life and spirituality. His
painting of Julian's revelation, A High and Spiritual
Shewing of Christ's Mother was awarded the Blake Prize in
1987.
The entire cycle was exhibited in Norwich Cathedral in 1988
and his work still holds pride of place in St Julian's
Church, Norwich.
Explorations and journeys, physical and spiritual, were a
characteristic of much of his later painting. His
connections to spiritual values led him to being awarded the
Blake Prize again in 1991 and he also painted the shrines of
Our Lady and Our Lord at Christ Church St Laurence.
He was one of the great teachers of art. On his return to
Australia in 1976, Oldfield joined the full-time lecturing
staff at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education.
He was to remain on the staff until this year, as the
institution first renamed itself the City Art Institute and
then transformed into the College of Fine Arts, University
of NSW.
As a teacher he was famous for getting surprising results
from the least promising of students. One of the reasons for
his success was that he could say with a chuckle comments
that others would not dare utter. After the students got
over the initial shock of being told they needed to totally
rethink their approach, they would respond to his insights.
He was also an inspirational teacher of art history on
renaissance art, and his passion for the art he loved was
totally infectious.
After the death of Davenport in 1997, Oldfield was supported
by his colleagues and came to realise that this small
faculty of the university was part of his extended family.