Painter, was born at Laidley, Queensland. During the 1930s she studied art with Vera Cottew at the Brisbane Girls Grammar and at the Central Technical College. During WWII she served for four years with the Air Force and when demobilised in 1946 was appointed an assistant teacher of art at the Tech. While teaching there she was awarded the Queensland Wattle League Scholarship. In 1948-49 she studied under William Dargie at the National Gallery School Melbourne under the terms of the Rehabilitation Training Scheme. In Melbourne she submitted a group of works to the Half Dozen Group of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship and received the 1949 award, allowing her an additional year’s study in Melbourne. Her major work that year, The market queue, Victoria Markets 1950, however, did not win the School’s Travelling Scholarship, but she was awarded the Hugh Ramsay Portrait Prize and also the Sara Levi Prize for the most outstanding student (for a portrait of fellow student Val Myers). Having saved for years, she was able to finance her own European study in 1951-52, where she visited galleries and studied at La Grande Chaumière, Paris. After returning to Brisbane she taught art at Moreton Bay College, Somerville House (Joan Kerr was a student in c.1955-56 ) and Ipswich Girls Grammar and, from 1955, at the Central Technical College. She became at full time teacher at the last from 1966 until retiring in 1984. In 2000 she was the subject of a focus exhibition by Glenn Cooke at QAG to mark International Women’s Day and her 80th year and in 2001 a larger more comprehensive retrospective was mounted at the Gold Coast City Art Gallery.

Betty Quelhurst died on 13 August 2008 and was cremated at Mt Thompson Crematorium, Brisbane on 19 August 2008.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1999

Last updated:

2011