Olivia and Bettie…A Wonderful Pair!
BETTIE PAGE BY OLIVIA
If you thought that the pairing of the world’s premiere pin-up artist Olivia, and the most celebrated pin-up model Bettie Page, would be a match made in Heaven, you would be one-hundred percent correct. Like peanut butter and chocolate, the two were made for each other. Bettie Page by Olivia is a brand new book from Ozone Productions featuring over 50 paintings of the reclusive Ms. Page by Olivia.
Hugh Hefner provides the foreward to the book that gives Page & Olivia fans 80 pages of delectable art. Why Hefner? Well who better? Page appeared as a centerfold in the magazine in the 50’s and many of Olivia’s Page paintings first appeared in Playboy.
Several pieces are what I call progression pieces. We get to see Olivia’s preliminary pencil sketches on one page and the finished painting on the next. A great example of this is on the painting entitled The Substitute, as it’s a Bettie in thigh-high leather boots and black mini skirt taking over the classroom as the new teacher.
“Hot Sauce” will sure to be a favorite among fans as Bettie is decked out in a provocative devil outfit: red leather boots, arm-length red gloves, and red leather bra and panties, complete with devil horns and a little tail. The two pieces with Bettie dressed up in a French Maid’s outfit are also sure to please her legions of fans.
An index in the back of the book provides the title of each painting as well as the medium in which it was completed, and where the piece originally appeared. Kudos to Ozone for including the index, something that is agonizingly lacking in many art collection books.
There’s something for every Bettie fan to be found within these pages. Fetish fans will love Bettie, again all in red leather, riding crop in her teeth, or the piece entitled ”Rawhide” where cowboy Bettie is getting a spanking from a gorgeous blonde Indian maiden.
The icing on the cake in “Bettie Page by Olivia” is an ultra-rare interview with Page, now in her eighties, conducted by I.S. Levine. In the interview, Page talks about her rural upbringing in Tennessee, as well as how she first broke into modeling. While Page was one of Playboys earliest centerfolds (1955) she didn’t meet Hugh Hefner until some forty years later in 1996. It’s a short, but fascinating interview.
Rounding things out, Olivia shares her own feelings on Bettie and what makes her such an intriguing subject, not only for her own work, but also for all the Bettie fans around the world. It’s a magnificent book. Cliché as it may be to say, this is simply a must have for fans of Bettie page or Olivia.
