Boonah landscape, 1962, Margaret Olley

Margaret Olley was deeply grateful when her friend, poet and art critic Pam Bell, invited her to visit Aroo Station at Boonah, west of Ipswich. This sojourn provided Olley with new subject matter for a number of landscapes and homestead portraits in the early 1960s.

Boonah landscape was inspired by the view of Roadvale and the distant McPherson Range, which Olley took in as she travelled to Aroo. There is an intense colour relationship between the hot sun and the red volcanic earth, and the colour tones of the grass in the foreground, the fields in the middle ground, and the road that sweeps towards the mountains in the distance.

Using the slider below, you can view the painting with a raked light view - this means it has been lit from a oblique, almost parallel perspective - accentuating and showing the relief, the brush strokes, the paint and textures of the work.

Original - Artwork
Processed - Raked light

After seeing the raked perspective, the high resolution image player can encourage you to pause and find more detail in the artists work and compare with the original work.