Photos: Courtesy Linda Gill, taken by Sait Akkirman
Kim Wright and Barry Lett discovered Miss Scales working in Auckland a year or so ago. She is still painting.
We hope this exhibition will tell people of a lifetime of painting, from her sometimes didactic early work to the poetry of her plum trees and the portraits.
The beauty of her vision comes from her thinking about painting and from the grace and care she gives to her work. Without this, how could the plum trees have grown and the portraits become so real?
Some of Miss Scales's paintings were shown informally in a friend's home last year but this is her first one-woman exhibition in a public art gallery.
The exhibition has been organised by the Auckland City Art Gallery's Exhibition Department with the additional help of Anne Kirker and Brenda Gamble and the support of the Director, Ernest Smith. I thank all these people and, of course, Miss Scales who made the paintings and who is kindly permitting them to be shown.
Colin McCahon, Auckland, November 19751
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Masonic Village
Rotorua
9th December 1978
Dear Gretchen,
Thank you very much for your letter, and the marvellous post-card; bust, by Picasso, of the girl in pensive mood – the fine drawing of foreshortened hand appeals very much:
Thank you so very much for the coloured print “Christ” by Greco: it is beautiful – he is especially strong with the greys.
Thank you very much for the “Still life with apples” by Cézanne It is beautiful in its greens and compositions Take care of yourself, with so many thanks
F Helen Scales
"We may not have a female Leonardo, and we certainly don't have a male one (we live in 1980, not 1480) but we do have: Frances Hodgkins, Dorothy Kate Richmond, Grace Joel, Maud Sherwood, Gwen Knight, Mina Arndt, Margaret Stoddart, Flora Scales, Edith Collier, Rhona Haszard and Rita Angus. All these women were born within forty years of each other and together they form the nucleus of our first painters born in New Zealand".
Gretchen Albrecht, extract from a talk given to the Auckland City Art Gallery Associates: ‘Why is there no female Leonardo?'
Of the women mentioned, only one. Flora (or Helen) Scales, is still alive. Aged 96, she is living in the Masonic Village in Rotorua.
Like many of her generation, Helen Scales spent most of her working life in Europe. She returned briefly to New Zealand in 1934, fresh from the Hans Hofmann school of painting in Munich. It was one of the most advanced art schools in the world.
The effect on Sir Tosswill Woollaston of the ideas she had absorbed there is crisply described in his autobiography 'Sage Tea' .
Since Helen Scales returned to New Zealand in the 1970's Gretchen Albrecht has been in touch with her, not because her ideas are as revelatory as they were for the young Toss Woollaston, but because her life is exemplary in its single-minded devotion to painting.
"She pared everything away. Down to a suitcase and a folder. She even gave me her painting box when she went back to Europe for the last time. I sent it on to her and made sure she got it."
In February 1984 Gretchen and I visited Helen Scales in Rotorua. I liked very much this meeting between the two painters. They became too absorbed in what they were saying to notice the click of my camera.
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1984
When we went into her room she was sitting on the bed and looked up, perplexed. Her eye-sight is poor.
“Hello, Helen. It’s Gretchen. Did you know we were coming?”
“Oh Gretchen! How nice of you to come.”
Her voice is deep, somewhat hoarse, precise, slow.
“Did you get my letter?”
“Oh yes, but I haven’t had time to read it yet.”
Sage Tea 1934
I had been thinking of going to Christchurch and asking to be allowed to draw from the model without instruction, paying what fees might be considered appropriate in that case, when a letter came from a Mrs Reeves there, whose lawns I used to mow and give her occasional lessons in art, since she was too shy to attend classes. At her house I had been most interested in some modern paintings by her sister, who had studied in Paris. She now wrote that her sister, Miss Flora Scales, was staying in Tahunanui, Nelson, and suggested I should go and sec her.
This was just what I was looking for. I wrote to Miss Scales and asked if she would give me a term's tuition for the same fees as I would have paid at Christchurch.
She answered demurringly - I would profit more, she thought, by going to Christchurch than by having lessons from her. But I thought quite otherwise, and let her know by return post. She consented to my going to see her so that we might have conversations, but would enter into no such binding arrangement as taking fees from me would have imposed. To be near her I applied to a distant relative I had met somewhere churchly with the Everys in 1930 – a Mrs Tosswill living on the hillside above Tahunanui asking if I might stay with her in return for gardening in the mornings. She agreed, and so began the series of live conversations I had with Miss Scales, recently from the Hans Hofmann school in Munich, her latest place of study.
'In Paris,' she told me, repudiating my admiration of those paintings in her sister's house, 'you can see everything, but in Germany you can learn everything.'2
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1934
I learned that vanishing perspective was out. My relief and excitement at this knew no bounds. In some lecture notes Miss Scales lent me and I copied out, it was referred to in quaint foreign English as 'the fatal inherity of the Renaissance'. She explained: we know that the distant mountain is bigger than the house or tree in the foreground, and may modify its apparent size to fit our knowledge better than its appearance does. The truth is not in a photograph – if we take a photo of distant hills, they look about one third the size we see them. If we bend down and look at the landscape between our legs, with our head upside down, then the hills will look one third their 'natural’ size – just as in the photograph. This indicates how in our normal everyday seeing we unconsciously modify the appearance by our knowledge of what things really are.
Further, we see space increasing outward from our viewpoint, the foreground being only a few yards wide, the distance miles. Lines diverging outwards correspond to this feeling, converging ones do not. (Forty years later, in the writings of Georges Braque, famous French painter, I came across this precise confirmation of these ideas: 'Perspective is a trick and a bad trick: it prevents you from grasping the object.')3
Gretchen sat down on the bed beside her.
“How good of you to come. Such a very long way. Did you come in a motor car?”
We moved through the courtesies, very Edwardian.
“And have you been doing a lot of painting?”
She has no repertoire of small talk to insert between the outermost formalities and the inner concerns.
She listened intently as Gretchen spoke about her own work.
Sage Tea
1934
I now looked at Cézanne with the beginning of understanding. In Dunedin I had looked at Rodney's print of The Smoker with love and awe, but with my mind unable to do more than dumbly sense its stillness and solidity, like a rock; or my taste, than feel that its colours were like those of nature – those of weathered rocks for example, perhaps covered with lichens.
But now I learned that his pictures are full of a new kind of space, not imitated from the appearance of space in nature but created in terms of the two dimensions of the picture-plane itself. The picture-plane – there was a term and a thought I had never isolated before, the basic technical fact of painting. Technique, from now, was going to be of the mind more than of the hand. How you related other planes to the picture-plane was the important thing and, done rightly, it would create the sense of space. The lines you did it with, far from merely imitating the outline of objects, had to be so disposed in contrast to flattening repeated verticals or horizontals as to create movement and tension. And colour – its purpose was no longer mere imitation either, it had to create harmonies. To this end, the old fading of colours into distance was abandoned, a red on a distant mountain should be as strong as was needed to contrast effectively with, say, a blue or a green.4
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1934
It seemed this might produce crudeness of colour but if subtly and carefully handled it would produce glowing harmonies instead, colours of an intensity completely unavailable within the concept of nature-copying – as in a painting of her own Miss Scales showed me, done from the hill above Tahunanui, in which there were reds in the hills across the water near Separation Point that amazed me. It was as if the distance had come close up yet was still distant. It was extraordinarily exciting and, of course, on instructed reflection, it corresponded with the nature of painting, actually on a flat surface, no part physically further from us than another.
This makes fairy tales, of course, of those legends so beloved of the public, of grapes for instance being so realistically painted that the birds came and pecked them. I have never felt tempted to subscribe to the belief in them; birds know a piece of canvas or board when they see it, whatever is painted on it, and will never attempt to fly through it. (Glass is another matter, they don't see that, but only what is on the other side of it.)5
“And what about you, Helen? Have you been doing any work?”
“I’ve been getting lazy. It’s not good to be lazy. This afternoon I shall do some work.”
She spoke almost fiercely, as if repenting the demands she had made on herself throughout her life.
But she is frail now, shaken by spasms of dry, harsh coughing, a handkerchief always ready.
To get up, washed, dressed, to keep up with business matters, with the routine of the rest home, requires all that is left of her physical energy. Even to lift a crocheted rug from the bed was difficult: her actions tended to remain defeated, uncompleted. The afternoon for work would probably never take place.
Yet the time we spent with her was not washed over with pity and regrets, We felt renewed by the example of her dignity and unassailable inner strength.
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The beauty of her vision comes from her thinking about painting and from the grace and care she gives to her work. Without this, how could the plum trees have grown and the portraits become so real?
Sage Tea
‘Always draw from a position above your subject,’ instructed Miss Scales, ‘and tilt the planes up, to make them closer to the picture-plane.’ (It reminded me of the boy I took up the hill that Sunday morning in 1930, who thought the sea had tilted up and would flood the land unless we went down.) Always, too, draw as if you were more to one side or the other, not squarely in front of your subject. To achieve this, and as a result of it, your verticals will be, no matter how slightly, in contrast with the edges of the picture-plane, your horizontals with the top and bottom of it (not parallel with them). If I argued that a line in a Cézanne print looked vertical, she would counter that if you measured you would find it wasn’t quite.
Now that we have had Erle Loran's and other books of photographs of Cézanne’s motifs with reproduction of his paintings, these statements will surprise nobody; but then they were outrageous, all the artillery of propriety was ranged against them. Mr Hedley J. Savage, a picture-framer of Hardy Street in Nelson, when I brought him a watercolour of my own to be framed a year or two later, offered to trim the edges so as to 'straighten up the verticals'. And soon the phrase ‘earthquake school’ was coined to describe this sort of painting. The boy on the hill had a numerous following.
My own work now appeared flat and weak. In Miss Scales’s work I noticed the strength of the feeling of space – ‘over-thereness’, I called it in my mind, the over-thereness of the object.” Distant objects fully grasped and powerfully drawn emphasised the feeling of space far more than their pale visual remnants could in naturalistic drawing.
Miss Scales went to work on my submissions. After a palliative initial 'It's very nice', she would make clear their weaknesses. Overlapping planes (of which there was no knowledge in my drawings) gave a powerful sense of space. It was a waste of a row of pinetrees, for instance, not to treat them thus.6
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Shading for modelling was as unnecessary as vanishing perspective. There was none in Japanese or Chinese art. In the lecture notes was a story about this, of a Miss White who, in the last century, obtained permission through a court lady who was her friend to paint a portrait of the Empress of China. But after one sitting the Empress without explanation refused to sit again. The court lady, distressed on account of Miss White, did an unprecedented thing, she asked the Empress why. It was because, Her Majesty answered, she ‘couldn't have posterity believe that one half of her face was dirty.’ Miss White had painted the shadow according to the European convention. To eyes accustomed to see only the colours of things painted directly, it looked like dirt.
But when I pointed out that there was modelling in a Picasso head we were looking at, Miss Scales countered quickly, ‘But not too much modelling.’ I think she must have meant that Picasso's use of it had a purpose apart from mere realism. It was used as a dramatic colour-contrast and so released from the bondage of representation. Something like a good story compared to a reported fact, the stuff of realism transformed into art.
There was no end to it. By the second or third talk I was fuller than I could digest – yet I came for more. I stumbled up the newly-formed Tosswill Road, eighteen inches deep in shingle, reading the notes as l went. (Nevertheless glancing at myself from the side, as it were, noticing how excited I was and how absorbed, yet not walking over the edge of the steep bank nor in the middle of the road where a car might come.)
There was a book of the aphorisms of Paul Cézanne, containing such things as: 'Gradually, as one paints, one draws. The more the colours harmonise, the more the drawing becomes distinct.' Where now, the old idea of drawing perfectly first, and then putting on the colour like a coat of paint on a house?7
Sage Tea
I talked to Miss Scales of the beauties of the landscape at Riwaka, and tried to tempt her to go there to paint. Even if I didn't go so far as to suggest going there with her, I would have liked to see what she did with a landscape I knew well.
But she wouldn't. She would only paint from a hill where there were houses, she said. On an uninhabited hill she would feel as if a hand might clutch her from behind. l had to confess that the hills round Riwaka had no houses on them.
She began to persuade me to go myself to Munich, to the Hans Hofmann school; but I didn't see how I would ever have the means, or the adventurousness of some people who worked their way on boats and knew how to survive in foreign countries. She encouraged me to save up. She used her charcoal down to the last atom, pushing a tiny, diminishing piece about on a drawing with the tip of her finger. (Draw for a month, she said: then, when you can find out no more about the subject, pin a butter-paper over it and paint on that; then if the painting is good, transfer it to canvas.) When I laughed about the way she used the charcoal down to the last bit, she advised me to do the same – so as to save money – ‘for you-know-what, Mr Woollaston.’ I thought of the thousands more drawings than I would ever be likely to do that it would take to save enough charcoal for the fare to Munich – and I knew I would never go.8
That spring I told them at the Suter Art Society, of which I had now been a member for some years, of the wonderful artist I had met, and suggested they invite her to be a guest exhibitor. When they heard the name Scales, and knew the family was respected and wealthy (old Lady Scales, Mrs Every told me, used to pray every time a ship of the Scales Line went out, and they never lost one) they readily agreed. But when they saw the work she sent in, charcoal drawings a month worked-on, paintings on butter-paper, pinned down in one case with drawing pins where the paper had torn – they were shocked and felt I had deceived them. I suppose, in a way, I had, not telling them how unlike the public-pleasing work they liked it would be. As to its integrity, hardworkingness, and strength of composition I hadn’t let them down, I had offered them far more than they knew they were getting.
By then it was October, Miss Scales had long made it clear my visits were a burden she wanted to shake off (the fifth visit was my defeat, standing outside the door she had opened only a crack to talk to me through, till I should go away) and this exhibition invitation was a ruse on my part to have the opportunity of looking at her work some more. I really got some benefit out of the Suter Art Society's Spring Show in 1934!9
There are some words I can hardly bring myself to use these days, they trip so glibly off the tongue.
One of them is ‘creative.’
Yet what else will do for this cluster of ideas: receptive/responsive, heart-mind-body whole, light-hearted + serious, transforming?
So, I love Gretchen because she is ‘creative’
She receives the raw material of her life with zest and gets to work on it.
Out of this joyous, tough-minded activity come her beautiful paintings.
But the transformations are everywhere else as well. She transformed what could have been a depressing visit to an old peoples’ home into an invigorating experience.
Before leaving Auckland, she carefully sorted out then reproductions of paintings to show Helen.
“I wanted to give her mind somewhere to go.”
It was such a simple, obvious, appropriate thing to do that it took real cleverness to think of doing it.
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Remembering Helen’s failing eye-sight Gretchen chose mainly portraits. With their solid contrasting simplicity and broad sweeps of colour, they are easier to see than details of landscape.
Helen painted many portraits herself. “Her self-portrait was for me the best work in the 1975 exhibition at the City Gallery. A wonderful painting – almost wraith-like, with burnt-out sockets for eyes, black coals: it had so much of the feeling of the late Bonnard self-portrait.”
Gretchen also concentrated on painters Helen would remember after a life-time of looking in the Galleries of Europe: painters of the past who have stood the test of time. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velasquez, Giorgione, Piero della Francesca, Rubens….
As Gretchen had hoped, Helen recognised most of the paintings.
It was as if a crowd of dearly-loved friends had arrived in the room.
If anything, the paintings seemed more real and important to her.
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'Helen loved the Italian primitives so I put in the Piero Baptism of Christ. It's in the National Gallery and she knew that collection very well. Also it's very important for me, the way the figure of Christ divides the painting into two perfect halves under this beautiful arched top. It's a bit like the Annunciation of Filippo Lippi, which has the sense of opposites being reconciled under the distended arc: the giver and receiver of a message, indoors and outdoors. I could talk about my work to Helen through these two paintings. I think for Helen it would be more the kind of space in these early Italians: although they are so solid it is quite a shallow space like a stage . All her painting life she was trying to bring the space up to the front of the picture plane."
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'This Rembrandt Self-Portrait is in Amsterdam and I hoped it would remind her of all the other self-portraits, those in the National Gallery, especially the late one which is so moving with its putty nose, smeared paint for eyes and the bags under the eyes. All the signs of what he would be like as an old man are there in the vulnerable young face.'
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'Velazquez, Portrait of a gentleman A sooty black painting, such a contrast to the warm gold tones of the Rembrandt. The flesh seems cold, ivory-like, evenly lit, not animated like the Rembrandt by the play of light and dark across the face. Spanish painting has this special atmosphere, dark, brooding, ..as if the people are smouldering.'
'I chose this Lorenzo Lotto Portrait of a young Man for its rich colour, these Bellini-like blues and greens, and the planes of the face are flattened out. I thought she'd like that. It's very Italian.'
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'Vermeer's Kitchen Maid is a great favourite of mine, with the light flooding over the figure and onto the wall. The surfaces are glorious, the paint is stroked on or encrusted: there is real substance to the substances he paints. Vermeers are like little jewels'
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Velazquez again. The Lady with a fan It has these strong contrasts between black and white, and that indeterminate tone which creates the Spanish mood.'
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'I put in the Rubens drawing of a lioness because Helen began as a painter of animals. Her father sent her to the School of Animal Painting in London: she was fond of animals and good at drawing them. She studied there for four and a half years. I suppose it was a safe, ladylike sort of painting to do. She sought out better teaching later, but she continued to draw and paint animals. I remember two neighbouring Siamese cats who took over the kitchen in her tiny flat in Mt Eden, soaking up the warmth of the radiator she put on for them. She did paintings of them. And an Alsatian dog later when she went to live in Rotorua.'
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"... a big white house with rooms to let - I knocked and she called 'Come in' and there she was…pink and blue and straight - painting at an easel with a little flower painting on a chest of drawers - a very sparse room. I sat on the bed when invited and she was charming and we talked easily...What a wandering, independent [sic] life! I was full of admiration. A real person..."
(Patricia France on Miss Scales in a letter to Colin and Anne McCahon from Dunedin, 1975)
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Born in Lower Hutt in 1888, Helen Flora Victoria Scales is a representative of that breed of intelligent, independent 19th century women who set themselves a goal and attained it, regardless of difficulty or disability, which in her case, was persistently poor health.
Brenda Gamble, Introduction to the Helen F. V. Scales at the Auckland City Art Gallery, 197510
14 January 1980
Masonic Village
Rotorua
Dear Gretchen
Thank you very much for sending the beautiful post-card of Velasquez [sic], “the Princess” you would have seen a number of his paintings in Spain – what wonderful drawing and colour in those compositions. You would have found the new Musée d’Art Modern [sic] quite fantastic with all its marvelous [sic] collection. The Abstract by Gleizes and a Braque, on the top floor – it takes time to appreciate the works.
Cézanne ‘Anemonies, van Gogh self-portrait one of his best – very expensive –
Do the American public appreciate those lovely paintings?
I hope you are very well and not tired.
Please excuse my bad writing.
with love from
Helen.
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Diego Rivere’s [sic] depicting man’s heavy responsibilities is marvelous: what lovely paintings you are able to study.
My sight is not good: Miss Gill and Mrs Chappel came to see me – it was a pleasure to me:
you are wonderful to write during all your travelling, new experiences and sightseeing.
3rd December is your great Christmas card by [illegible]
my pen is drying up – so very difficult to go into Rotorua to obtain another –
Lovely to see; ‘La Grande Jatte’ and “Bedroom” Van Gogh. money well spent by the Museum [?].
with love from Helen.
1 Foreword by Colin McCahon, Helen F. V. Scales exhibition catalogue, Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, November 1975, pg 5
2 Woollaston, M.T., Sage Tea: An Autobiography, Collins, Auckland, New Zealand, 1980, pp 244-245
3 Ibid, pp 245-246
4 Ibid, pg 246
5 Ibid, pp 246-247
6 Ibid, pp 247-248
7 Ibid, pg 248
8 Ibid, pg 249
9 Ibid, pp 249-250
10 Excerpt from Introduction by Brenda Gamble, Helen F. V. Scales exhibition catalogue, Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, November 1975, pg 7