painter, commercial artist and theatrical designer, was born at Echuca, Victoria on 11 May 1922. In 1940-45 she studied at the Melbourne Technical Art School (RMIT) under John Rowell (husband of Eugenie Durran ) and, briefly, with Murray Griffin then taught there in 1945-46. She met the painter Newton Hedstrom at one of Rowell’s classes and held her first exhibition with him at Melbourne’s Myer Gallery in 1946. The couple married and settled in Sydney, where they shared a studio with Theo Batten at 236 George Street.
Marjory was an inaugural member of the Studio of Realist Art and exhibited with SORA, the Society of Artists and in various competitive exhibitions. Her painting, The Headland , was hung in the Wynne Prize in 1948 and declared by Bernard Smith to be 'well above the average of the rest of the exhibits’. Her Coastal Highway was hung in the Wynne Prize (AGNSW) in 1950. She won the Warringah Prize in 1979 and the Lane Cove and Young Prizes in 1986. During the late 1940s and early 1950s she did freelance illustration work, producing a series of advertisements for Arnott’s Wafer Wheat Biscuits that revolve around the active delights of a utopian Australia. This work stands in contrast to her drawings of food rationing, e.g. a pen and ink sketch from 1948 showing a woman and a child hovering on the fringes of a street market.
Penglase sketched backstage with the Borovansky Ballet from their first Australian season. She also designed for amateur dramatic groups in Melbourne and Sydney. Her first extensive overseas tour was made in 1976, when she went to the UK and Europe. She returned to Europe in 1980 and visited China in 1982. A couple of her paintings were included in the Manly Art Gallery’s Newton Hedstrom retrospective.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Holder, Jo
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
