Phyllis Shillito and her colour curriculum 1945–79

Eva Fay FDIA taught colour and design in Sydney from 1979 at various TAFE colleges, The University of Sydney, University of Technology, Sydney, and the School of Colour and Design, which she co-founded in 1983. She is a founding member of the Colour Society of Australia and was awarded Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia in 2012. In 1976–78, she undertook the three-year full-time course in colour and design at the Shillito Design School, which included two years of colour exercises and projects taught by assistant teachers Peter Travis OAM, Roslyn Kean, Gary Shinfield and Jean Savage. In 2021, Eva described and illustrated these exercises and projects in her book Shillito Design School: Australian colour education in the ‘70s, and this year she donated her collection of notes and exercises from the course to the Caroline Simpson Library.

Jocelyn Maughan OAM studied at the East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School, Sydney) from 1954 to 1958, graduating with a Diploma of Fine Art with honours, specialising in painting. During this period, she studied colour under painters including James (Jimmy) Cook and under head of design Phyllis Shillito. Her teaching career included 32 years at Meadowbank College of TAFE, where she established a Fine Arts section and became the inaugural Head of the Art School in 1966. Jocelyn’s painting career spans more than six decades and she remains very active as an artist at age 85. She is an exhibiting member of the Australian Watercolour Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Art Society and was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday 2018 Honours List with an Order of Australia Medal ‘for service to the visual arts, and to education’.

Dr Catriona Quinn teaches design history and theory at UNSW Sydney, where her prize-winning PhD on the role of the client in interior design was awarded in 2021. At Sydney Living Museums (now Museums of History NSW), she curated Rose Seidler House, the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection (now Caroline Simpson Library) and, in 1993, the first historical exhibition on an Australian interior designer. Recent publications include chapters in The other moderns: Sydney’s forgotten European Design legacy (2017), Margo Lewers: no limits (2022) and for Fabrications, the first literature review on postwar Australian interior design (2024). Catriona is active in the international field, presenting at conferences and as a committee member for the Society of Architectural Historians Historic Interiors Group.

Dr David Briggs has been teaching classes on colour for more than 20 years, and currently teaches colour, drawing and painting at the National Art School and the University of Technology, Sydney. His publications include a chapter on colour spaces in the Routledge handbook of philosophy of colour, (2020) and a two-part paper on the elements of colour in the Journal of the International Colour Association (2023). He also has two outreach websites, The Dimensions of Colour and Colour Online. David was past president and is currently Vice President and NSW Divisional Chair of the Colour Society of Australia, Co-Chair of the AIC Study Group on Arts and Design and is a committee member of the AIC/ ISCC Colour Literacy Project. In 2022, he co-authored with Eva Fay a study of Shillito student material that was published in the Proceedings of the AIC 2022 Conference in Toronto, Canada.