Ivy Shore

Ivy Shore (1915–1999), painter, was born in Melbourne, daughter of a South Australian suffragette, Elka, and engineer John Williams. After her father died in 1919, the family relocated to Adelaide. She trained as a seamstress before marrying a financier, Ray Shore, and moving to Sydney. Bored, she enrolled in painting classes with Graeme Inson, a disciple of Max Meldrum's. Separating from her husband in 1960, she bought a house in Ocean Street, Woollahra and in 1962, soon after Shore was widowed, Inson moved in. Through the 1960s Shore continued to develop her artistic skills under Inson, and he in turn eventually dubbed her 'my greatest student'. She first entered the Portia Geach competition in 1976; she won it in 1979 with a portrait of Della Elliott, now in the National Portrait Gallery collection. Inson was so irritated by the style of the portrait – a departure from the Meldrum method – that he went to live in his studio, but he returned home after a week. Shore used her prize money to have a studio built by architect Peter Moffitt above the garage of her house, and painted there out of sight of Inson. Over the coming years Shore continued to exhibit in the Portia Geach award, winning Most Highly Commended three times, and the Royal Easter Show Art Prize Exhibition. In 1993, she created her last painting Influences, a tribute to the five people who had most influenced her, depicting Henry Hanke, Robert Haines, Justin O’Brien and Lloyd Rees at a dinner table, Inson holding forth with a glass of wine in hand. This painting now hangs in The Dundee Arms Hotel in Sydney, where Inson once had a studio, alongside Inson's favourite of his own portraits of Shore. Her work is included in many galleries and private collections in Australia, UK and France.