Stan de Teliga, 1973

Stan de Teliga (1924-1998), artist and teacher, arrived in Australia with his Polish parents in 1926. After war service, he completed his diploma at Sydney’s National Art School in 1951, and tutored in art at the University of Sydney before spending six years in Hobart as a keeper at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Recipient of various gravelling grants in the 1960s and 1970s, from 1958 to 1995 he held about twenty solo exhibitions at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney and Solander in Canberra; he won many modest art prizes between 1962 and 1972. Meanwhile, he was director of the Blaxland Gallery from 1960 to 1966; he taught at the National Art School from 1966 to 1974 and was briefly head of the school; later he was a senior lecturer at Alexander Mackie College and the City Art Institute. He was an astute angler, and built a house near Nimmitabel, New South Wales, where he could see the trout rise. De Teliga’s bright abstracted landscapes are held in the National Gallery of Australia and several state galleries, as well as many institutional collections and regional galleries.

Vaike Liibus arrived in Sydney from her native Estonia as a twelve-year-old. Having studied window dressing, millinery and art, she was eleven times an Archibald finalist between 1956 and 1983.

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of the Liibus family 2015
© Estate of Vaike Liibus