Nationality New Zealand Name Flora Scales | Known for Painting | |
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Full Name Helen Flora Victoria Scales Born May 24, 1887 ( 1887-05-24 ) Lower Hutt Died 1985, Rotorua, New Zealand | ||
Helen Flora Victoria Scales (1887–1985) was a notable New Zealand artist. She was born in Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand in 1887.
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Education and artistic training
At the age of 16, Scales was sent to Christchurch to attend the Canterbury College School of Art.
In 1908 Scales left New Zealand to study painting in England with animal painter William Frank Calderon. In 1911 her Cattle mustering in New Zealand was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Career
Scales returned to New Zealand after four years in England and continued to paint and exhibit occasionally. In 1928 her father died, leaving her a small legacy that allowed her to concentrate on painting. Scales travelled again to Europe in 1928, spending time working at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Dissatisfied by the teaching at the Academy, Scales travelled to Munich where she attended Hans Hofmann's art school, and over the winter of 1931–32 studied Hofmann's principles of modernism with Edmund Kinzinger. She returned to New Zealand in 1934.
Although Scales continued to paint throughout her life, the first public solo exhibition of her work was not held until 1975, organised by Colin McCahon and the Auckland Art Gallery. Reviewing the exhibition, art historian Neil Rowe wrote in Art New Zealand:
One of the more extraordinary stories in the history of New Zealand art is that of the rediscovery of eighty-eight-year-old Miss Helen F. V. Scales (better known as Flora Scales) after a forty years disappearance. Over this period her importance in a historical context has become considerable. About a year ago Auckland gallery directors Barry Lett and Kim Wright met Miss Scales living and painting in Auckland, after having returned unheralded from the United Kingdom. An exhibition was mounted at Auckland City Art Gallery last December (incredibly her first one-man show in a public gallery) and shown recently at the Peter McLeavey Gallery in July.
Influence
On her return to New Zealand in 1934 Scales met artist Toss Woollaston in Nelson, and allowed him to study her notes from Hoffmann's training. Woollaston later cited the importance of this encounter on the development of his painting in his autobiographical text The far-away hills : a meditation on New Zealand landscape (1960). Rowe writes:
In viewing a representative body of her work (forty- three paintings from 1939 to 1970) we can see the stylistic influence Miss Scales, and indirectly Hans Hoffman, had on the young Woollaston, and ultimately on his mature style. Hans Hoffman has been a seminal influence in post-war American art, and on the New York school and Jackson Pollock in particular. That his theories and techniques radically influenced one of our own important painters is entirely due to Flora Scales.
Scales' life and painting has also inspired contemporary German-based New Zealand artist Ruth Buchanan. Buchanan showed a work based on her research into Scales at City Gallery Wellington in 2011-12.
Collections
Works by Scales are held in the permanent collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Auckland Art Gallery, Christchurch Art Gallery, The Dowse Art Museum and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.