24 Facts About Joy Hester

Joy Hester was a member of the Angry Penguins movement and the Heide Circle who played an integral role in the development of Australian Modernism.

Joy Hester's work was charged with a heightened awareness of mortality due to the death of her father during her childhood, the threat of war, and her personal experience with Hodgkin's disease.

Joy Hester is most well known for the series Face, Sleep, and Love as well as the later works, The Lovers.

Joy Hester was born on the 21 August 1920 and raised in Elwood to middle-class parents Louise and Robert Joy Hester.

Joy Hester studied art from an early age and was a student at St Michael's Grammar School from 1933 to 1937.

At 17, Joy Hester enrolled in Commercial Art at Brighton Technical School for one year before leaving to attend the National Gallery School in Melbourne.

Joy Hester's curriculum was based in traditional media and practice, however Hester took the opportunity to break free from formal restraints.

In 1938 Joy Hester won the Gallery School's Drawing Head from Life prize.

In 1938 Joy Hester met fellow artist Albert Tucker and began living with him intermittently in East Melbourne.

Joy Hester met Melbourne-based art patron Sunday Reed in 1939 at the Herald Exhibition, which brought British and French artworks to Australia for the first time.

Joy Hester was a contemporary of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman, John Perceval, Yosl Bergner and Danila Vassilieff during this period.

Joy Hester was the only woman to be featured in the Angry Penguins publication.

Joy Hester was influenced by artist Ailsa O'Connor, who had similar concerns in her work.

Joy Hester was drawn to the work of Vassilieff for his philosophical views about how art and life could not be separated.

Joy Hester's focus shifted towards the motif of the human face, specifically the expression in the eyes.

Joy Hester's works aimed to capture the psychological horror of World War II.

Five years later Joy Hester gave birth to a son, Sweeney Reed.

In 1947, when Sweeney was three, Joy Hester was diagnosed with terminal Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Joy Hester had two subsequent solo exhibitions in 1955 and 1956 but struggled to sell her art.

Joy Hester typically worked on a small scale in black ink and wash Australian modernism favoured large oil paintings, like those of Nolan.

Joy Hester's work failed to garner the same recognition her male peers received, dismissed by critics as "angst-ridden".

Joy Hester published poetry and used her drawings to illustrate her words.

Joy Hester was laid to rest at the Box Hill Cemetery in an unmarked grave, at her behest.

In 1981, Janine Burke, Joy Hester's biographer, curated the first major retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria.