Guelda Esther Leah Pyke was born to Henrietta (née Jacobsen) and E.A. Pyke on 11 September 1905, at “Thorahaven,” Armadale, Melbourne and attended the Church of England Girls Grammar School. She is reported as acting in a performance of its Old Grammarians’ Club drama group at age 21 and designing its costumes. McCulloch notes her “lively personality.”
After three years studying commercial art at Swinburne and having discovered that employment in graphic design was limited and limiting, Pyke made and sold fashion accessories and paste jewellery in carved wood and pokerwork, before expanding her design in the 1930s to theatrical wall masks in painted clay alongside production of belts, bandeaux and brooches for which she resourcefully used found materials. Her designs are noted in several Bulletin magazine ‘women’s pages’ articles during this period and in 1931 she spoke on radio about ‘The New Necklets.’ She frequented horse-races in Melbourne to show off her fashion designs which were regularly described in Table Talk and elsewhere.
On 28 January 1933 she left on the Moldavia for a year in England and by April was staying in Hampstead, before traveling to Denmark to visit relatives and then to Scotland. While in England she noted the vogue for mass-produced decorative Austrian porcelain masks, so trained in pottery and modelling with fellow Australian Kingsley Doubleday at his workshop in St Johns Wood, developing her own approach to hand-built pottery masks to be used in modern decoration, remarking that “Some are pretty some are grotesque. They are supposed to be designed to suit the ideas and personality of the individual.” She reported in January 1934 to The Age on the Sunday Times Book Exhibition and its speakers Elinor Glyn, Helen Simpson, James Agate, and Marjorie Bowen at Sunderland House, and on return she was interviewed by The Herald and Table Talk for which she described modernist trends in theatre and interior design for children and adults, and regaled the reporter with a story of her dressing as an organ-grinder’s monkey for the fancy dress parade on the ship home. Her masks were the subject of a number of newspaper articles and were stocked that year at Farmers department stores in Pitt and George streets in Sydney.
She and sister Mollie continued to live in the family home at 74 Alma Road St Kilda (since demolished). In the mid-30s and in April 1936 they were farewelled at a party given by Yvonne Cohen and her sister Valerie, and boarded the Orsova for England, staying in Allon, Scotland. She had success marketing her artificial flowers and decorative belts in colourful lenci felt to London stores before the siblings returned to Australia on the White Star Line SS Ceramic in late 1937.
IN 1939 she spent time in Lorne with Mary Lundqvlst, Yvonne and Valerie Frankel-Cohen, Pat Goldman and CatheIne Neylon and in Sydney marketed novelty hatpins from large wooden beads with ceramic hats and painted faces.
At the end of that year Pyke stayed in Bali, and had lessons in wood carving from a Balinese “Gusti” (Prince), and was reportedly the first European to learn the craft . She also admired cuffs and collars of coarse linen, patterned with leaves and flowers in golf leaf.
During WW2 Pyke joined in a number of volunteer activities. She and her sister held a party for the wartime Comfort Fund in May 1940, and in December she assisted as a member of the Society of Woman Painters at a Christmas Fair at Ola Cohn’s studio to fundraise for the Children’s Hospital and joined the Women’s Agricultural Security Production Service (W.A.S.P.s). In 1941 she was ticket officer for a barbecue in aid of the Melbourne District Nursing Society’s After-care Hospital and the Originality branch of the Australian Comforts Fund and at the Airforce Auxiliaries Ball. The Originality group also held a Christmas stall at the Manchester Unity Building in November, rising £3,000 by the end the month.
The 1940s presented distractions from her art-making; the sisters’ father died on 23 September 1941, and on 19 August 1943 Pyke suffered lacerations and a head injury when she and three other Red Cross workers on their way to Heidelberg Military Hospital , where Guelda provided rehabilitation classes, were involved in a car accident. The family moved to 644 Toorak Road Toorak, where their mother died on 13 March 1944.
Pyke joined Lina Bryans’ circle at Darebin from late 1945, along with other painters, and contributed to the Vance and Nettie Palmer Tribute Fund when Bryans was its honorary secretary in 1959. Bryans painted Pyke’s portrait.
After the war the sisters holidayed on Timana island, Single Bay and Dunk Island in 1946.She was convenor of the Raisin Fair at “Grong Grong,” Toorak, in November to aid the Mildura branch of the Melbourne University Amenities Fund.
On 11 October 1947 she was profiled in the ninth of the The Age series ‘Women in the Arts’ : Studio in a Garden.’ It detailed her small studio, her pottery-making process, and her rehabilitation program at Heidelberg Hospital.
With her sister Mollie and Val and Yvonne Cohen, in 1948 Pyke purchased the 8Ha orchard “Stella Park” in Templestowe and engaged a share-farmer to manage it. Their modernist home, and separate ones for each of the Cohens, was designed by Alistair Knox in 1953 in sympathy with the natural landscape. An article in The Herald of 9 March 1954 notes that it was painted in celadon green with white trim with a decor of deep blue ceilings above the stone-faced fireplace and Indian rugs and hessian-covered walls providing texture. The four companions lived there into their eighties.
Pyke attended sessions at the George Bell School in Melbourne between 1946 and 1951, and her paintings started to attract critical attention in the 1950s when she exhibited alongside Ann Montgomery, Eveline Syme, Murray Griffin, Frank Kane, R. W. Rowed, Arthur Markham, Helen Ogilvie, John Brack, Geoffrey Jones, Barry Kay, Dorothy Braund, John Rogers, Charles Blackman, Helen Ogilvie, Michael Shannon and others
Having both visited before the war Pyke went to Bali with Yvonne Cohen in June 1954 with letters of introduction from Melbourne friends to Chorkorda Agung—a Balinese local ruler and patron of arts. They spent time studying indigenous arts and crafts. Balinese imagery and style features strongly in her work. After three weeks, they returned on the Nieuw Holland on 14 July 1954 and several reports of their sojourn appeared in major papers. Subsequently she showed in the Melbourne Contemporary Artists 1954 Exhibition at the Victorian Artists’ Society, and the Argus critic Arnold Shore noted “A certain feminine quality of painting” in her still life offering, while Allan David in The Jewish News remarked that it showed “some fine handling of paint. Here the work is vigorous, but in no way crude. The cool colour scheme helps to restrain the exuberance of
the composition and enhances the work.”
Pyke studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School in 1957
She subsequently traveled extensively, including a caravan journey through Greece, Iran, Pakistan, and India in 1961 with Nancy Grant and Dorothy Braund, returning to Greece for their third tour with Braund in 1965.
Her first solo exhibition was in Melbourne in 1963 and she continued exhibiting until the 1980s. McCulloch notes that “her spontaneous paintings have a sensuous, decorative quality.” Eric Thake created a bookplate lithograph for her in 1971, and in reference to her name and character it depicts a pike about to catch a dragonfly.https://www.agsa.sa.gov.au/collection-publications/collection/works/bookplate-guelda-pyke/60211/
Her solo shows were at Leveson Street Gallery, Niagara and Eastgate Galleries
Before Pyke died on 13 May 1994 she was interviewed in The Age, on 25 November, 1992 when she was eighty-seven.
The highest price for a work by Pyke was A$4,230 for Woman by a Table with Flowers auctioned at Deutscher-Menzies, Melbourne on 29 November 2000
Robert Hughes in The Art of Australia records that Pyke owned a work by Ian Fairweather who also worked in Bali: HIllside, China, gouache on paper, 1949, p.290
- Writers:
-
James McArdle
- Date written:
- 2023
- Last updated:
- 2023
