fig. 1: Flora Scales, Untitled [Portrait of a Woman in a Green Dress], 1978 – 1983
fig. 2: Flora Scales, Theo [Portrait of Male Head], 1982
These very late portraits – smudgy, blurry, smeared, furiously brave, dabbed-on strokes of paint. Heads forming and dissolving, turning towards us, eyes askew. [fig. 1, 2, 5, BC093]
Brown and white shapes coalescing into cats, seen from above, supine on the floor with legs and paws extended. ‘Puss’. ‘Tomato’. ‘Gollie’. [BC082, BC083, BC119 pp 7, 8]
And notes on drawings in sketchbooks, in Helen’s shaky handwriting commenting on her deteriorating eyesight: ‘…cannot see very much today’. ‘…cold still...sight poor’. [BC116 pp 3, 9]
Comparisons with Monet’s deteriorating eyesight before his cataract operations are obvious. Comparisons too with Bonnard in her surprising colour combinations and construction of form via smudged strokes and areas of thinly applied colours coalescing into her subjects, e.g. pine trees, lemon trees, plum trees, self and family portraits.
Almost all Helen’s paintings were small, the size determined by her habit of unpinning the paintings from small store-bought stretchers or frames and travelling, always travelling, with this cache of beauty lying flat on the bottom of her suitcase as she moved to her next rented room or flat.
When I met Helen in January 1976 her longing for Europe, in particular France, was palpable for she dearly missed the great art galleries and museums that had sustained her since 1908 when she first travelled to London to enrol as a student at the Calderon School of Animal Painting. Her well-documented painting life in England and France exposed her to all the major modernist art movements of the 20thC.
Also, the lessons learned in 1932-34 at Edmund Kinzinger’s classes of structure and dynamic form are still evident in her drawing notebooks of heads, figures, animals, and underlie her loosely painted landscapes.
Helen’s late paintings have always struck me as ‘felt’ responses to her subject, bordering almost on abstraction, like Turner’s c1830’s small colour sketches which seem like precursors of abstraction in their reduction of nature.
Her ‘subjects’ (landscape, portraits, et al) are subsumed by the primary purpose of the creation of a painting driven by an emotional perception. Comprehension of the ‘subject’ is arrived at through colour, brushstrokes, composition, and an authenticity of expression.
Let’s look at three paintings:
Untitled [Lemon Tree] 1976
Three Trees Brentwood Ave 1977
Untitled [Jacob] 1978
fig. 3: Flora Scales, Untitled [Lemon Tree], 1976
Lemon Tree (1976) [fig. 3] was painted sitting in the kitchen of her Brentwood Ave flat looking out the back door across the lawn to the right-hand corner of the garden, where a lemon tree grew, heavy with fruit, in a blaze of yellow and green. I visited Helen while she was painting this and could observe her minimal means and use of the subject ‘at hand’.
Her painting has reduced lawn, lemon tree, fences, and a darker tree beyond to blocks of colour and diagonal lines and shapes. The geometry of the painting is composed roughly of a green, top right, ovoid shape beyond the lemon tree and a patch of white sky top left, a rectangular light green lawn in the foreground cut into on left and right by two triangular shapes defined by broad linear brushstrokes of white paint, which focus visual attention on the semi-circular lemon tree in the centre. The lemon tree is defined by scumbled lemon yellow overpainted with broad gestural, impastoed, brushstrokes of light chrome or Naples yellow, the tree trunk is scraped back to reveal the primed canvas with a few delicate vertical lines of brown on the left. Her palette of colours range through chrome green, viridian green, yellows, ochres and browns, a blush of pink, and white. There are many areas thinly painted or left unpainted where the white primed canvas support is visible.
We experience the lemon tree as both solid and shimmering, essential and radiant.
Three Trees 1977 [fig. 4]
Also painted in Helen’s Brentwood Ave flat, these three pine trees could be seen from her front window looking left towards Dominion Road. They stood there for many years and were iconic landmarks rising up where now there is a fly-over motorway link.
They provided Helen with a triumvirate group of solid vertical forms rising darkly against the light sky, seen above the horizontal stretch of road in the foreground, and diagonally cut in on left and right sides by the curtains framing the window. Sky, trees, curtain, and road, (vertical, horizontal, diagonal) are her compositional essentials. With her palette of blues, greys, white, greens, a rusty red and pale ochres she proceeded to break this geometricity down with very free and loose brushstrokes, building up skeins and loops of colour to focus our attention totally on the conical shapes of the trees and anchoring their verticality with broad brushy horizontal paint strokes in greys and white over pale ochre for the road. The curtains are barely there, just wispy, diagonal marks indicating the view is from inside her room and introducing that diagonal element which draws the eye into the central motif of pine trees.
On a visit to Helen, shortly after this was painted, my husband, the painter James Ross and I found that she had cut this painting into two vertically up the middle, being initially unhappy with it. But she had kept the pieces and told us of her regret, so with her permission James took it home, glued both parts together again onto a backing board and returned it on another visit. Here it is.
fig. 4: Flora Scales, Three Trees Brentwood Ave, 1977
Untitled [Jacob] 1978 [fig. 5]
Jacob, Helen’s great-great-nephew, was painted in Rotorua in 1978 on her return to New Zealand as a result of falling ill in France. It is an arresting portrait of a young child quizzically turning to face the artist. In spite of the obvious evidence of the deterioration of Helen’s eyesight, it is full of light and colour; eyes, mouth and nose reduced to ciphers beneath the golden fringe of blond hair. There is a solidity to the head and fleshy pink of Jacob’s face rising above his scribbled-in, blue-clad shoulder. On the right side of the painting, barely suggested, his hand is holding a vertical stick or toy.
Untitled [Jacob] reminded me of the extraordinary 1968 self-portrait by Helen Portrait 3 [BC066] that was included in her Auckland Art Gallery exhibition of 1975/76.
A similarity in use of black shapes for eyes and a triangular line or wedge of paint defining the nose. Only the lips – full for the child, a wriggly line for the older artist – are different and expressive of their ages.
What seems essential in understanding Helen’s approach to painting is not to be found in a faithful rendering of subject, but through the transformation of her material into a painterly form that reveals the sensations her paintings give rise to, and allows us to experience the evanescent and changing landscape and the search for the essence of the sitter.
Gretchen Albrecht
August 2026
fig. 5: Flora Scales, Untitled [Jacob], 1978