Orchard with Plum Trees

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. 38 in this exhibition.

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.

The accompanying wall panel text for this work in the exhibition Modern Women: Flight of Time, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand, 2024, written by curator Julia Waite, reads, “The V-shape near the centre of Flora Scales’ Orchard with Plum Trees, 1969–70 was a recurring compositional device in her works that demonstrates the influence of her training with modernist German artist Hans Hofmann, who encouraged artists to move away from single-point perspective. In this small-scale painting, fuzzy passages of acid green are interrupted with flecks of red and subtle areas of warm and cool tones. It exudes a vitality and immediacy, which intensifies with continued looking.

Artist Gretchen Albrecht recalls the force of seeing Flora Scales’ paintings at her solo exhibition of 1975:

My response to these self portraits . . . and a poetic group of landscapes all titled Orchard and Plum Tree, with their strokes of paint dissolving and reassembling edges and planes of colour, was immediate and intense. I left the gallery driven by an urgent desire to meet and speak to the woman who had painted them . . . For me she was living proof that painting could stand at the core of a woman’s life and sustain her through anything.”