Portrait 1

Title supplied by the artist for Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, exhibition, Helen F V Scales, 1975-1976. Listed as artwork no. 12 in this exhibition.

The Auckland City Art Gallery preparatory catalogue notes suggested dates 1970-1976 for all three included self-portraits [Portrait 2 [BC065], Portrait 3 [BC066], Portrait 1 [BC120]]. Scales was in New Zealand 1972-1976. The gallery later revised the date to c1968 for the printed catalogue, at which time the artist would have been in England or France. 

This is a reproduction of Portrait 1 [BC120] from 'Art award a lottery for losers' by James Ross, The Week, 16 July 1976, pg 17 (black and white). This is the only image recorded of this work, its location is unknown.

Although this is a portrait of Flora Scales, as is Portrait 2 [BC065] and Portrait 3 [BC066], in conversation with M. de Lange, 1983, Scales said, “I never did self-portraits, just used myself as a model when necessary.”

In a letter from Colin McCahon to Peter McLeavey, 13 July 1976, McCahon writes about a recent visit he had made to Flora Scales [see Related images 1 and 2], “We went across the gully to ask Helen [Scales] about the portraits (Anne bearing a jar of pea soup) had a 20 minute chat & sent the telegram. Helen says that there [sic] not real portraits – not what are called portraits. They are all 3 very like her.” The telegram McCahon mentions, sent the same day, simply states, “Actual self portrait. Colin.” McLeavey must have previously asked McCahon if they were self-portraits.

This is a painting of the artist scrutinising her reflection with a cool intense gaze. It is a penetrating search for structure as if her own head was an architectural or landscape subject to be investigated and reconstructed.

Toss Woollaston in correspondence with B. de Lange, 05.05.1983, wrote, “After stimulating me thirty-nine years ago Miss Scales has done it again. This time not because of the theories, but because of her painting. The paint is the thing. It is so sensitive, infinitely varied in application, strong and adventurous.”

Toss Woollaston in correspondence with B. de Lange, 29.06.1983, wrote, “And in the self portraits the construction is again part of the expression, and, greatly, a means of it. Whereas the drawing dated c 1930 [Untitled [Cubist Drawing of a Seated Man] [BC098]] wears its construction like plates of armour, the recent works have plenty but it doesnt [sic] show. It is absorbed into a way of painting so sensitive and personal that its contribution cannot be isolated. It can to some extent be described in "Portrait 2" [BC065] – the short steep diagonal upwards to the left in the chest and shoulders, contrasting with the much longer upward-to-the-right one in the head; which again contrasts with a shorter flatter diagonal to the left across the face – this last echoing, while it varies from, the one in the torso.

But this description as it stands is too simple – to extend it would be to emphasise that these diagonals are not merely lines but become planes and volumes that impart life to the painting by their movement over the page and through the space of the picture.

Construction in these portraits is subtly and powerfully the means and mode of likeness. The "Portrait 2" [BC065] is a picture of an old woman first and a particular old woman last. The construction is powerfully – and delicately – appropriate to the subject. The brush strokes are so sensitive, the colours so beautiful. There is a quality that is hard to describe about both the pencil marks and the brush strokes – as if they hesitated to come into existence – but they do arrive, they make it – and the result is an amazing degree of sensitiveness. There is no weakness, the underlying sense of purpose and structure is so strong it looks after them, as a mother would her children. In a painting of this kind, at this height, the question of 'likeness' does not arise. In the differences between each portrait there is an assurance of a profound likeness to the undoubted individuality of each. Construction is used to achieve this. The same painter's vision is in them all – the same means. Infinitely varied yet always recognisably the same painter's vision. It makes no grandiose statement. It is just 'there'. It is like life itself.”

Excerpt from Toss Woollaston's essay for B. de Lange, 1992, “When I saw the [1976] exhibition of her work at the Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington I revised my estimation of her as an inveterate student. The pictures were all small, beautiful and sensitive evidence of an artist's personality. Nobody else could have painted them. I would dearly have liked to acquire one or both of her self portraits with the head tilted to one side, not only laterally, but in depth, so that your vision moved with it in deep space – but they were gone before I got to the exhibition.”

FLORA SCALES – The Lost Portrait

This painting is one of the twenty-five paintings that remained unsold when the exhibition, Helen F. V. Scales, closed at the Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington, on 19 July, 1976.

These paintings were airfreighted by McLeavey to the Auckland City Art Gallery on 20 July 1976, from where they were returned to Scales before her departure for France in December 1976.

In a letter to B. de Lange dated 1977, Patricia France records that during her visit to Scales at her Mt Eden flat in 1976, she told Scales she, “...had been unable to come to her exhibition so she opened her suitcase and this painting was on top.” Patricia France promptly bought the painting [St Michael [BC041]].

It is a tantalising image; the open suitcase, the painting on top and perhaps an unknown number of paintings lying below. Almost certainly there would have been the unsold paintings returned to her by the Auckland City Art Gallery and others which, like France’s had not been included in the exhibition.

It could be assumed that the canvases would have been unframed and unstretched, to fit in a small suitcase. Perhaps Scales had freed the paintings, once exhibited, from their stretchers with a sharp blade to make them more portable. This could also explain the irregularities in the measurements in some of her paintings.

In this way, it would have been possible for Scales to carry many paintings back to France in her suitcase. For example, ten unstretched canvases stacked together could be as small as ten millimetres deep and the weight would have been negligible.

Three of Scales’s paintings were left at the house of her godson, Boris Kalachnikoff, in Bry-sur-Marne, France, when she returned finally to New Zealand in 1977 [Port of Mousehole at Sunset [BC026], Les Anemones [BC048] and Le Bleymard, Lozère, France [BC078]]. The unknown number of paintings that Scales brought back with her to New Zealand, and the paintings she had made at Brentwood Avenue, Mt Eden, in 1977 and 1978, formed the collection at the Rotorua Masonic Village from which Janet Paul selected seventeen paintings. These became part of the Scales donation to the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, in 1979. How many remained at the Village and what became of them is unknown to date.

 - B. de Lange, March 2023