Nancy Borlase

Nancy Wilmot Borlase AM (24 March 1914 – 11 September 2006) was a New Zealand-born Australian artist, known for her landscape-based abstract paintings and portraits, and as an art critic and commentator.

[1] Borlase moved to Australia in 1937, at age 22, where she studied life drawing and sculpture at East Sydney Technical College under Frank Medworth and Lynden Dadswell (1937–1940)and also life drawing under Rah Fizelle and Grace Crowley[1] before switching to painting.

[1] She lived for a while next to Sidney Nolan in Melbourne, was befriended by his benefactor John Reed, and worked as an artist's model.

[2] Borlase started as a figurative painter before moving to abstract impressionism.

Her work was influenced by a study tour to New York in 1956, where she encountered Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko.