User:Hartnell-young/Sandbox

Early life and education
Maree Therese Menzel was born in Dimboola, in western Victoria, in 1949, the second child of wheat farmers, Owen and Irene Menzel. Menzel began her schooling at Wail East State School:"I grew up on a wheat farm in the Wimmera and went to a one teacher school with about a dozen other local children. The first actual picture I remember constructing was a typical child's drawing of a house, garden, surrounded by family and animals. When it was finished and carefully coloured in, I then meticulously drew spirals all over it and with blacklead painstakingly added small dots in all the spaces so that the original picture was completely obscured. I remember feeling proud and satisfied at the result until our teacher asked where why I had scribbled on my picture. Scribble! ‘Goodness, where was he from?’ I thought, ‘hasn't he ever seen a dust storm!’."From an early age, her mother encouraged her to dress in creative costumes for children’s parties, and to walk like a model when appropriate. Menzel’s first success came at the age of 7 when she won second prize of £1 from 53 entrants in the Junior Regatta Girl (7-13 years) in Dimboola in 1957. A local newspaper described her frock as ‘blue figured nylon over blue taffeta’.

Menzel soon attended St Brigid’s College in Horsham and later boarded at the Convent of Mercy in Ballarat. In 1967 she commenced a Diploma of Art and Design at the Prahran College of Advanced Education. Here she was influenced by Rowena Clark, the Head of Fashion Design. After her first year Maree was awarded a Commonwealth Advanced Education Scholarship, based ‘on results obtained in first-year examinations’.

In 1983-5 Menzel completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, graduating with Distinction at the Victorian College of the Arts. Here she focused on printmaking. However, she said: "…the real joy for me at being back at art school was the opportunity to draw and paint. The hours of working with black and white in the print room at a labour intensive and unforgiving medium made me long for more immediacy and colour."

Career
Design

In the early 1970s, Menzel spent 3½ years in Europe. On the island of Crete she had a small clothing design shop displaying her own work, including bikinis and beachwear. ) Following a serious motorcycle accident, which resulted in facial injuries, she went to England, where she and a friend kept house for Lady Helen and Sir Alan Lubbock at Adhurst St Mary, the ancestral home of the Bonham Carter family. A letter from Lady Helen to Maree’s parents stated:"I think you might like to know how much pleasure it gives us to have your Marie (sic) with us. She could not be a more charming pretty girl and her gentleness is so attractive…Marie worries about the scars she got from her accident in Crete, but I can assure you that, to an observer they are barely visible and have not spoilt her beauty in the least. And my goodness, she is beautiful."Maree encouraged Lady Helen to take up painting and assisted a local theatre group by designing costumes.

Theatre 1970s
Moving to London, Menzel took a position making costumes for the English National Opera, while in the evenings, she attended the Chelsea Art School to pursue her love of drawing. She realised that she wanted to design for theatre:"The very first day I started work was also the first time that I went to the opera. I had no idea it could be so marvellous. I decided I wanted to design in theatre. Maybe this was what i had been looking for. I got to design some amateur theatre in London eventually and then moved to Sweden where I worked for 1½ years for Svenskan Riksteatran, the National Swedish Touring Theatre making costumes, but they eventually allowed me to do some design work and I was thrilled. Every Saturday I would go to the Stockholm KumSkolen and study life painting."Menzel returned to Australia to design for the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) including productions that toured to other cities:


 * The Wild Duck 14 June 1977
 * 24 Jan 1978 Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, Russell St Theatre Melbourne
 * 10 March 1978 Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, The Playhouse Theatre Perth WA
 * 26 April 1978 Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, Union Hall Adelaide SA
 * 23 May 1978 Departmental Russell St, Theatre Melbourne
 * 1 June 1978 Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, Theatre Royal Sydney
 * 12 Dec 1978 Arsenic and Old Lace, Atheneum Theatre Melbourne

Menzel’s colleagues in the MTC Design studio at this time were Tony Tripp, Hugh Colman, Anne Fraser and Steve Nolan.

The Victoria Opera

At the age of 28, Menzel was described as the ‘brilliant young Maree Menzel’, joining the ‘world famous Kenneth Rowell' to form a prestigious duo of designers in Victoria's state opera company.


 * 1977 L’Orfeo

Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo opened at the Princess Theatre, on 2 July, directed by Robin Lovejoy, conducted by Richard Divall and starring Ian Cousins and Halina Niecharz; Menzel designed both sets and costumes. Felix Werder, The Age critic, thought 'Maree Menzel’s design '… first class and properly Mantuan. I loved the touch by which the nymphs were dressed in Botticelli’s La Primavera costumes, particularly as the composer had just come back from Florence'.

Theatre 1980s and beyond
1984 The Real Thing, Atheneum Theatre

1992 Mistress, Anthill Theatre

1994 Steel Magnolias

Fashion

During her studies at Prahran Tech, Menzel had begun modelling part time, encouraged by a fellow student. Modelling was not her true passion, but a means of paying for necessities. Nevertheless, Menzel was described as an ‘elfin new face on Melbourne’s modelling scene’ and ‘the girl with the Audrey Hepburn look’. She signed with Georgia Gold and other agencies.

By 1972, Menzel was both modelling and writing for the first Australian pop music newspaper Go-Set. Her quirky titles included ‘A guide to tarting your face on the cheap’, ‘Happy hats’ and ‘Excessorising’.

Menzel reflected on her return to fashion design:"I had become the stage designer that earlier I had planned but there was still something missing! I continued to design in theatre but soon took up employment in what I was trained in: this was Fashion Design. I got a position at Prue Acton. The world of fashion was just as you would imagine it: frantic, temperamental, fickle intense vibrant fun. I was designing, so drawing was an essential part of my job. It was expected that we would make simple, neat working drawings of our designs but I’m afraid there was no satisfaction in it for me unless I could give it a bit of atmosphere and create just a little drama."As principal designer for Prue Acton’s Melbourne Cup outfits, Menzel had the opportunity to showcase Australian fashion on a world stage. Her designs included the Titanium outfit (1983), Mock Croc (1986), and an embroidered navy linen suit for Derby Day 1987. Menzel also designed ‘Fantasy Head’. a mask for a charity auction at the Metro Nightclub in the late 1980s, using green and gold fabric scraps to evoke sea and bush themes.

Interiors
Menzel's keen eye for colour and creative sense of humour led to several interior designs and window dressing jobs. Her Port Melbourne home, with a deep orange Moroccan-inspired lounge room and hand painted mandala ceiling rose, is featured in Places, a photographic book by Earl Carter and Jean Wright.

A major project for fashion designer Gregory Ladner involved painting the entire main bedroom walls in Chinoiserie style; trompe l'oeil bookcases and an antique lounge suite with upholstery painted to look threadbare.

Artistic inspiration and style
Menzel acknowledged the influence of the work of the early 17th century French painter, Georges de la Tour, travelling to Europe to seek out his surviving works. She was also intent on seeing the portraits and especially the self-portraits of Rembrandt.She said ‘To me Rembrandt’s self portraits speak directly across time and have been a guide to me of the appreciation of any picture regardless of style or medium.’

Menzel returned from Europe ‘saturated with the imagery and in awe of the achievement of others. It was not so much debilitating but humbling. I started a series of self portraits – just me, the paper, paint – a bit of light and my hands. My funds were exhausted so I had to go back to work.’

She also looked to more modern influences such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.

Menzel held a long-lasting concern for the quotidian domestic objects - cups, bowls, vessels, often in enamel - the cast of what we need to live, and what gives us sustenance and grounds simple, earthly meaning. These objects were honoured for their own revelatory capacity, but according to Le Plastrier they were also talismans by which she produced a world of meaning within a life that was also sometimes troubled, whose anxious pain she constantly sought to transmute into a higher experience (one enamel bowl painting is entitled "Acceptance".)

The safety of a home, and later nests, became a recurring motif in Menzel’s work. She describes her approach:"I gathered together a pile of pre-cut pieces of wood and placed them together, rather randomly and completed by painting the small assemblages with oil paint. The end results were five pieces rather like three dimensional paintings or small theatre sets, yet the space contained in them seemed to me neither theatrical nor mannerist. I decided to use the pieces for models in drawings more often than not choosing one that I had called ‘Hut’. For some unknown reason I enjoyed placing this rather fragile hut in various uncomfortable surroundings and always enjoyed the finished drawings of it presenting a ‘safe’ area in an ‘unsafe’ background. Within the hut sculpture I had painted an imaginary light source with corresponding shadows, the outside of the walls being bluish/black as if in a night landscape."

Court drawing
From the late 1980s until the early 2000s, Menzel worked as a court artist:"At first the experience was harrowing. I have once been to court over traffic fine and I had found it particularly bewildering. I couldn't help being struck by the similarity in the atmosphere with rituals and costumes of the church and the drama and pageantry of the theatre. The court seemed to be somehow for me a joining of the two. The justices, judges and advocates in their theatrical costumes, the sombre sets with carefully chosen levels with the defendants kept on the lowest rung surrounded by the returned wooden bars with symbolic jail. The witness box with the Christian Bible holding such sway until it becomes strangely irrelevant when a non believer takes the stand. After the first six months I couldn't help thinking how terribly ordinary the average murderer looks. I had expected distinct traits and I was eager to be able to judge or discern a characteristic so that I could categorise ‘murderers’ in my mind. It was a humbling experience. I could only murmur ‘there but for the grace of God go I’."

Awards
George Hicks Scholarship (VCA) 1983

Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Scholarship 1984

Victoria Law Foundation Best Illustration Award, 2004 Legal Reporting Awards

Personal life
Menzel married jewellery designer and musician Marcos Davidson in a colourful ceremony in 1989. She designed and made the costumes for a large bridal party of friends and relatives. Menzel and Davidson divorced in the 1990s. After many years with cancer, Menzel died on 27 December 2004 and is buried at Dimboola Cemetery.

That year, in a segment for EN CHOIR, a 6-night production by the Resonance Choir at the Melbourne Fringe Festival - Wikipedia, Maree shared her story. As she was very ill, it was performed by another chorister. I longed to yodel like Maria in the hills, to belt it out like Lisa or Shirley, or burn like Piaf  – or even just to sing like a child, with frank abandon, as I did in front of my classmates in my small country school. For 40 years my voice was used in muted compliance to smooth and calm, compliment and support, stroke and nurture. I began to long to call out to state my presence, my existence, my reality. To sing out like a fifth grader!

I got a flyer in the letterbox the day after I decided. I was terrified when I went along to choir, but was welcomed with comfort. Acting ‘normal’ I stood in the circle and opened my mouth quietly, making no sound, or whispering just a little.

Slowly, slowly, laughing, croaking like a frog

Wailing like a siren

Clapping and stomping

I began to call out my name in the circle game – to sing just a little.

To sing through divorce and illness.

To sing through the tumbling of my dreams.

To sing through my failures, my ordinariness. To sing through my fears. To sing slowly into the joy of belonging. To the comfort of belonging in my own skin. Jacinta Le Plastrier reflected on Menzel's life and work after her death:"Who close to Maree did not see alive in her a deep wound, imparted young, of having drawings not just neglected, but destroyed, by those who were not able, for their own powerful reasons, to affirm and support her nascent extraordinary talent? One could also argue that the world itself is not kind, is not a lover, of art, and that this experience imparted in Maree both an injury and a faith, so that she kept producing again and again work against this negativity, to redeem it. Art. Maree fought for her right to be an artist, in a way that was often painful to witness. But who can judge these things? From it she created a fulfilling, meaningful life and an extraordinary oeuvre of sustained beauty and witness to life's hope, an insistent resistance against its futility. How can one exceed that?"