A Friend of Flora

I first met Helen Flora Victoria Scales 43 years ago, and I have never ceased to admire her.

When she died in her 98^th year Helen (as she asked me to call her) had lived through two world wars and some of the most exciting changes in modern art. She was born in 1887, a year before Katherine Mansfield, and 18 years after Frances Hodgkins.

Helen left New Zealand four times, to study and to work for many years as a painter in England, France and Germany where under eminent tutors, she absorbed many avant-garde ideas on the practice of painting. This allowed her to develop her ideas in a post-Cézanne climate, and to create in her late paintings shimmering images of exquisite beauty and sensibility.

My first encounter with Helen was through her paintings which I discovered while wandering through the Auckland Art Gallery towards the end of 1975.  There, upstairs in one of the gallery rooms, was an exhibition of small oil paintings, mostly landscape and still life, including three self-portraits.  One of these self-portraits stopped me in my tracks with its extraordinary emotional power. The head was tilted on an angle, black smudges for eyes, a large triangular nose, mouth wiped away to a broken thin line, the skull beneath flesh palpably felt through a variety of licks, wisps and firm brushstrokes and smudges, and rubbed bare canvas patches.  The artist had created in paint an image at once vulnerable and strong, full of the presence of old age. In my mind it belonged with those late self-portraits by Bonnard and Rembrandt – direct, unsparing and revelatory.

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.

With the help of Kim Wright I found myself a few weeks later, heart pounding, knocking on the back door of a small flat in an old house in Mt Eden.  The door eventually opened a crack and, unable to explain exactly why I was there except that I had been deeply moved by her paintings, I was invited inside by a tall, elderly, thin woman. She was then 88 years old.

In a sparsely furnished room Miss Scales was painting a still life of flowers and fruit which were arranged on a sideboard among propped-up postcards, small finished and unfinished paintings and a well-thumbed, square- shaped and much treasured book on Cézanne, written in French.

Years later Helen told me that the landscape reproduced on the cover of this book was painted from the garden of Paul Signac in Saint-Tropez and that, during her frequent painting trips to that town during the 1930s, she caught glimpses of it through the big gates. A footnote to this was added by Dr Eric McCormick, the authority on Frances Hodgkins at this time, who told me that the villa next to Signac’s was occupied in 1931 by friends of Frances Hodgkins - George and Maude Burge - and that Frances had painted in their garden that same year.

I took Eric to visit Helen one afternoon, as Helen had known Frances, boarding at the same pension in St Tropez on at least one occasion. Her painting path at times paralleled Frances’s, but Helen viewed Hodgkins as a ‘professional’ painter and saw herself always as a student, ‘still struggling’ in her 90s ‘with her foregrounds.’

I saw on this first visit, laid out on the dining table, brushes, turps, oil, palette and an open French-made mahogany paint-box with lots of compartments full of paint tubes and pencils; but when I saw Helen’s huge round tipped brushes I could hardly believe they were responsible for the subtle scumbles and delicate strokes of paint with which she built up her surfaces.

Her paintings were all small, on commercially primed canvas tacked with drawing pins hammered in around the wooden stretcher frames, which she re-used constantly, removing the finished painting and tacking on a fresh canvas. The small, cold, impersonal three-roomed flat provided Helen with a certain detachment from place and possessions that gave her the freedom to concentrate entirely on her painting. Over the years I visited her there, no attempt was ever made to decorate or make her spartan surroundings more homely.

As with all Helen’s past rented rooms in boarding houses and flats the immediate environment provided her with subject matter. In Mt Eden the view from the open back door through the kitchen to a bright green lawn and a lemon tree dripping with fruit was available to paint in the summer; and when winter set in and it got too cold for the door to be propped open, the view from the living room window framed by white curtains of three dark tall trees and the Dominion Rd flyover was tackled.  On one of my visits Helen had cut in half one of her tree paintings with a pair of scissors and then regretted doing so, whereupon my husband Jamie glued it together again for her and it took its place in the pile of completed ‘off-the-stretcher’ paintings, at the bottom of her large suitcase along with her notebooks filled with diagrams and drawings made when she was a student under Edmund Kinzinger at the Hans Hofmann School of Art in Munich.

I can’t remember if we had afternoon tea on that first visit, but we quickly established a pattern of visiting that I was to follow until ill health and extreme old age made it necessary for Helen to enter a residential care home in Rotorua.  Usually I would arrive with a selection of soft, spongy, cream cakes which she particularly liked and we would sit up at the table where Helen would perform the task of tea-making and serving with great elegance.

The few essential pieces of equipment for this ritual; plates, teacups and saucers, teapot, knives to cut and forks to eat the cake with were radiantly transformed into objects of almost ancient significance.  After tea came the important part for us both when I got out my art books, catalogues and postcard reproductions of paintings which we carefully looked at and commented on. They acted as a memory trigger and Helen’s response was sharp, vivid and precise.

If Helen had seen one in a European museum or in an exhibition she would respond with enthusiasm, once describing an exhibition in Paris of Picasso’s monumental ‘neo-classic’ nudes of the early 1920s as being full of ‘big pink knees’.

Our contact was interrupted periodically over the years by travel abroad - hers and mine.  In 1977 when Helen’s eyesight was starting to fail and she desperately wanted to return to Europe but was lacking in funds, I held an afternoon tea and exhibition of her paintings in Helen’s flat and invited my women’s painting class and a few other friends along.  A number of Helen’s paintings were purchased, enough for her to go back to France. On her departure she gave me her precious mahogany painting box. Later, when I heard that her eyesight appeared to have stabilised enough to continue painting, I shipped it back to her in France.

Helen returned to New Zealand within the year in ill-health and with further deterioration of eyesight. We kept in contact but in her letters the writing became more spidery and illegible with the struggle to see.

Over the following years although our meetings were less frequent we kept in touch and whenever I visited a major art museum, I would buy postcards especially from the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery London, whose collections Helen knew almost by heart, and post them back to her or save them up for discussion the next time we could meet.  On these visits I would shuffle through a pile of them and read out the artist’s name and the title of the work that I knew she would be familiar with. It was a joyful experience to see Helen’s being suffused with memory, eyes half-closed, her mind carrying a clear image of the painting with all its associations.

Helen was extremely independent and self-sufficient, and although she obviously enjoyed our times together I never felt that I was essential to her life. For me she was living proof that painting could stand at the core of a woman’s life and sustain her through anything. She was humble and unambitious for herself but always hungry for painting knowledge, which ended in her 98^th year.  I am richer for having known and loved her.

Arriving into the light 131 years after Helen’s birth, this exhibition has been enabled through the hard work of Isabel Gilbert Palmer and Ali Evers-Swindell, who believed in the beauty and truthfulness of Helen’s paintings. The Curator, Sarah McClintock, and The Suter Art Gallery must be heartily congratulated for mounting this exhibition.

I hope Helen’s paintings will speak to a new audience and that they will find them as profound and meaningful as I have.