Orchard with Plum Tree

Title and date supplied by the artist for Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, exhibition, Helen F V Scales, 1975-1976. Listed as artwork no. 34 in this exhibition.

Purchased by original owner, Linda Gill, from the artist at a private exhibition in her Brentwood Avenue flat, Mt Eden, Auckland, New Zealand, August 1976, just prior to the artist returning to Europe. Gill’s diary dated 27 August reads, “I visited Flora Scales to pay for my painting. She came to the back door wearing an eyeshade blue on top & green underneath – she was “cleaning”. She wasn’t too happy with the painting, the seascape that I didn’t want [Gill had taken 2 paintings home to decide which to purchase].
F.S. ‘Too much like a watercolour’
L.G. ‘That’s all right isn’t it?’
F.S. ‘It’s not supposed to!’ Very firmly.
L.G. ‘It must be a very strange experience to come back to New Zealand after an absence of fifty years.’
F.S. ‘Yes a very strange & most unsatisfactory experience.’
F.S. ‘I think it must be hard to paint with yellow – so easy for it to become crude and glaring.’ (looking at Monet Waterlilies – all yellow)
F.S. ‘Wanting to paint & not being a millionaire, didn’t live comfortably – all that standing up at the easel I became most frightfully sick.’
F.S. ‘I think I should like to live among the trees. Among greens.’
F.S. ‘Travelling to St Tropez by train – most wonderful landscape…the farmhouses are pink and they rise straight out of the grapevines which are sometimes quite yellow.’
Mentioned paintings by Marchand in the Courtauld Institute.”

The central V-shape of the forked tree trunk is reminiscent of the ship's rigging seen in Scales's work of the 1920s [Shipping, Wellington Harbour] [BC128]]. It also brings to mind the agaves of the 1930s [Untitled [Mediterranean Scene] 1 [BC016]] and the derricks of the 1950s [Untitled [Mousehole Cornwall 2] [BC029]], in which this shape becomes a tool for her construction of dynamic pictorial space.

The V-shapes of the agaves, trees and derricks, significant elements in her work during and after the 1930s, begin to form the vocabulary of her Modernist work following Hans Hofmann's instruction to do away with single-point perspective.

As well as the equilibrium established by the balanced vanes of the V-shape, there is also an immanent sense of movement. Hofmann said, "We have to experience the object as vital in her existence in space" (Dickey, Tina, Color Creates Light: Studies with Hans Hofmann, Trillistar Books, Canada, 2011, pg 27). Hofmann explained that volumes revolve on their axes to create a sense of movement and counter-movement, which animates and gives depth to the flat surface of the picture plane.

Scales's use and manipulation of the V-shape is one of several examples in her work which demonstrate the way she assimilated, and made her own, the teachings of Hans Hofmann. This example in particular shows her personal interpretation, without imitation, of his theories about the creation of plastic space, which were crucial to the development of her modernism.