Prue Acton OBE is an Australian fashion designer, often referred to as ''Australia's golden girl of fashion'' during the 1960s. Prue received a number of awards during her career, including three international awards for Olympic Opening Ceremony Uniforms, five Australian Wool Board Awards, three David Jones Awards for Fashion Excellence and four Fashion Industry of Australia Lyrebird Awards, as well as receiving an OBE in 1982.
After closing her business in the early 1990s, Prue now works as a professional artist. She initially wanted to become a traditional artist - a painter - before focusing on fashion. At 15 years of age, Prue went to RMIT University (officially the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). She was one of the youngest ever to attend.
Right after graduating, Prue worked on clothing samples, and began her business in fashion design. At the start of her career, she wrote a fashion column for the journal Go-Set and was the first Australian female designer to show her own fashion range in New York.
Prue returned to painting in the 1980s. She shifted her focus from fashion to painting because she didn't want life to be all about making money and was becoming far more interested in painting. Prue found the art forms to be quite similar. She attended life drawing classes at Swinburne College, and studied painting with Clifton Pugh and Merv Moriarty OAM.
Prue Acton has two children, Tiffany Treloar and Atlanta Treloar from her marriage to Mike Treloar (dissolved) and two grandchildren, Ginger and Sunday. Her life partner is the late Merv Moriarty OAM, artist, art educator, founder of Flying Art School (now Flying Arts) and author.
In 2014, Prue and Merv Moriarty, Directors of Moriarty Colour Pty Ltd began a project to promote and licence products for modern colour education, colour tools and digital colour management.
Visit our COLOUR page to learn more about the award winning Moriarty Colour Wheel, and peruse the rest of the pages on our website to learn more about Prue and her lifelong love of colour and light.