Margaret Cilento (b.1923)

"CIRCUS: BETWEEN DREAM AND REALITY"
Written by Jeanne-Marie Cilento

Margaret Cilento has been drawing circus performers since she was a child in Queensland and later an art student in Sydney. Lady and Sir Raphael Cilento let their daughter wander through the bizarre sideshows she found fascinating at the Brisbane agricultural show and linger to watch the rouseabouts at Jimmy Sharman's Boxing Troupe. Both Cilento and Frances Lymburner won prizes in the show's art section as students.

When Cilento was studying art at East Sydney Technical School, she and Margaret Olley would take their sketchbooks to Wirth's Circus in the afternoon and draw the stage hands and circus performers preparing for the evening show. Cilento continued this theatrical theme in her work in New York when she went to see Barnum and Bailey while she was studying painting at Brooklyn Museum Art School and engraving at Atelier 17. Later, living in London she accompanied her actress sister to Pinewood Studios, drawing on set or in the dressing room while Diane learnt her lines.

Several of Cilento's new paintings have been inspired by those early sketches. But most have come from Cilento's close study of performances by the Cirque de Soleil, the Great Moscow Circus, Circus Oz, the Fruit Fly Circus and Silvers Circus in Melbourne from 2001 to 2004.

"The circus is a marvellous subject, especially the extraordinary physical feats and odd colour combinations'' says Cilento. "Dream and reality seem to merge in the surreal world of circus performances. Yet always lurking behind the freedom and strange glamour of the big top is the gritty, ephemeral nature of circus life."

As a lifelong student of drawing the human figure, Cilento says the feats of the trapeze artists and acrobats provide exciting new ways of seeing the body in movement. "I hope people will have the same sense of exhilaration when looking at the work."