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What: The Three O's
Where: Art Gallery of Ballarat
When: Until January 19
Tickets: Free entry
STARTING out as a scientist, it didn't take long for St Arnaud's John Ogburn to realise he was pursuing the wrong field.
Having worked as an industrial research chemist at Royal Dutch Shell in Melbourne for about two years, he soon came to see that art was his true calling.
"I realised that the life of an industrial chemist ignored, by-passed, or denied those very things in life most valuable to me," Ogburn is recorded to have said.
A few years after resigning from Shell, Ogburn started studying painting and drawing under Hungarian painter and refugee Desiderius Orban before having his debut one-man exhibition in 1953.
Ogburn's work, along with that of his European teacher Orban and renowned Australian artist John Olsen are currently on show at the Art Gallery of Ballarat as part of the exhibition The Three O's.
Featuring more than 90 works from collections around the country, the touring exhibition demonstrates how the arrival of European refugees assisted in changing perceptions of modern art in Australia.
"Desiderius Orban, the artist, and Dr Austin Woodbury SM, philosopher, were separately in act, but together in me, to exert a profound influence on my life," Ogburn once said.
Ogburn's widow Marita said her late husband's work was greatly influenced by his years growing up in St Arnaud.
"Growing up in the mallee area around St Arnaud gave John an experience of space and light which is reflected in his paintings," she said.
"He loved the world and he saw the world as it was created by a creator. He thought it would have endless new things to be seen.
"We just glance but might not really see what is there. He had this idea of seeing and the relationship between things that are disparate and unrelated but brought together in painting."