The artist Rae Richards died on April 20 at the age of 96 after almost 70 years of involvement with the Newcastle art scene. Her paintings, sourced from a great number of exhibitions held in the Newcastle area, decorate many of our walls. But her most visible artwork is surely the suite of fabric banners commissioned for the nave and chancel of Christ Church Cathedral.
The making of art defined Rae as a person. She was as entirely happy painting a rocking horse in posies of flowers as she was in capturing a favourite landscape in knifed-on slabs of oil paint.
Rae Richards arrived in Newcastle in 1957 with her metallurgist husband Peter and their three small boys, coming from Melbourne via a stint in Port Pirie. For the first time it was possible for Rae to attend art school, the Newcastle branch of the National Art School at East Sydney Tech. She had arrived too late to interact with the formidable modernist John Passmore, but his successor, English landscape painter Brian Cowley, was an abiding influence with his version of romantic Impressionism.
Artmaking became fashionable in the early 1960s and the first private art galleries nationally became social hubs. In Newcastle, the establishment of the forerunner to the University created a whole new openness to music, theatre and the visual arts.
Rae and her fellow students, Norma Allen, Mary Beeston, Elizabeth Martin, Betty Cutcher and Lillian Sutherland, also wives of professional men, established the first local art scene, with exhibitions of what they called The Low Show held in Norma Allen's basement in New Lambton Heights for four years from 1961, predating Anne von Bertouch's first professional private art gallery, which opened in 1963 and where Rae went on to exhibit many times.
Members of the group exhibited widely, with Rae's paintings selected for inclusion in the Blake, Wynne and Sulman prizes. Her work is held in all the public collections of this region. The importance of The Low Show has been recognised by artist historian Margaret McBride in a study to be published shortly.
It was also in the 1960s that Rae began experimenting with appliquéd fabric collage.
Unlike her evocative paintings of landscapes, they featured heraldic and narrative subjects influenced by folk art, densely patterned and intensely coloured. Boldly decorative works were commissioned with assistance from the Wool Board and the Craft Council for public institutions: colleges, churches, schools and offices, culminating in the great series of banners depicting saints and symbols in Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle. Banners were also exhibited in London in the Qantas Gallery at Australia House.
What made them distinctive from the other textile works developed at that time was the use of preloved commercial fabrics and their painterly quality when overstitched. Nondescript fabrics become magically modulated colour blocks. Fabric hangings have monumental presence in public spaces, so do fabulous beasts and the strongly heraldic animals and plants native to Australia designed for domestic interiors.
While accompanying her eminent metallurgist husband on business trips, Rae took opportunities to study folk fabric traditions in the US and Japan or immerse herself in the clear light and life-enhancing antiquities of the Mediterranean world.
Ceramics became a new activity in which to extend the pleasures of creation.
Lemon trees, olives and garlands of ivy appeared as elements in decorative schemes involving painted tiles, while Rae's bowls and platters, thrown by Sean Nicholson, celebrate the Lucullan delights of shared leisure.
Delight in domestic detail shines through an extensive group of still-life paintings in jewel-rich colours. Lemons and cabbages, pewter pots and earthenware bowls finally transcend the artist's pleasure in small things, growing at the last into sumptuous groupings of bottles, studies in statuesque authority.
The ceramics were designed for use and were regularly on the table in the lavish suppers so much a feature of Rae and Peter's entertaining.
There were many post-concert occasions following Musica Viva events when internationally celebrated musicians mixed with local friends and colleagues. In recognition of these special occasions and many years on the local organising committee, Rae was recently given life membership of Musica Viva; yet another aspect of a life richly lived in the arts.
Her final exhibition at the University Gallery when she was well over 90 showed no diminishing of artistic vision or the joy of creation.
A celebration of Rae's life will be held at Christ Church Cathedral on Tuesday, May 16, at 2 pm.
