Contemporary Artists | Period Artists (A-H) | Period Artists (H-Z)

Annette Ollivary

Fantasy Garden Lithograph, 30 x 22 inches

Annette Ollivary’s family is Burgundian in origin, but she was born in Marseille on December 12, 1926.  Her family owned a small farm on the Cote d’Or of Burgundy where she spent her vacations as a child.  They were ideal holidays filled with delight for a child who found in the farm animals and country scenery a rich store of experience that has remained in her mind as happy  memories ever since.  Memories of the days spent on the farm and of her grandfather’s  antique shop where she worked for a time. As a young woman, the beautiful things in her grandfather’s collection were fascinating objects to study and cast a poetic spell over the work she did in the shop.  Along with those thoughts, her grandfather told her of his adventures on the island of Madagascar, where he went on lion hunts and encountered natives who in his eyes were “good savages”, dreamed of in the philosophical system of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

From Marseille she went to Paris to study painting at the Academie Julian.  Those who see her paintings today are inevitably reminded of the work of Rousseau, but the resemblance is actually only superficial.  Annette herself declares that she had never seen any of his work when she started to paint.  An attentive study of her canvases reveal  that any parallel between her work and that of Rousseau is not really justified.  Annette paints in a manner that is distinctly her own.

The initial impression of  “primitive” or “naïve” painting is evoked by her subjects. There is nothing “primitive” of “naïve about her work.  Every line, every stroke of her brush betrays sure craftsmanship, a sense of composition, a planned use of color, a solid foundation of design.  She is occupied with a world that seems linked to a Golden Age or a lost Garden of Eden.  Her forests and fields are filled with gentle creatures of the jungle living together in peace.  The benign lions and tigers are the pets of the bemused children who play in the forests.

Gentle lambs, sheep, dogs, exotic birds gambol freely around the children without fear of the beasts who ordinarily are the most feared enemies.  Monkeys swing through the heights of the tropical trees.  Flowers of all colors bloom in profusion, bathed in the calm and limpid air.  Placid ponds and murmuring brooks of  crystalline clearness traverse these enchanted forests.  Sometimes Annette introduces the ocean in her paintings, but when the sea is depicted, its’ waves are graceful additions to the harmony of the composition, without any hint of the terror and death that can lie in an ocean storm.