FLORA SCALES

Early years

Born in Te Awakairangi ki Tai Lower Hutt in 1887, Flora Scales showed an obvious talent for drawing, and at the age of 16 was sent to Ōtautahi Christchurch to attend the Canterbury College School of Art for two years.

She travelled to England in 1908 to study animal painting at the W. Frank Calderon School of Animal Painting in London, and returned to New Zealand in 1912 after exhibiting in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1911.

Scales left again for Europe after World War I, studying in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Colarossi. More importantly, she later attended Hans Hofmann‘s School of Fine Art in Munich, where, over the winter of 1932–33, she studied Hofmann’s principles of modernism with the then director of the school, Edmund D. Kinzinger.

Scales spent World War II in French internment camps in Besançon and Vittel. During the war, much of her work that had been stored in Paris was looted and lost.

Flora Scales’ Artworks

Flora Scales was both a life-long student and an accomplished painter with a rich and resolved body of work. Scales painted landscapes, portraits and interior studies of flowers and still lifes. Many of her works hover at the edge of abstraction and are characterised by textured brushstrokes that blur the contours and outlines of her subjects. She often worked outdoors and painted harbours, hills, villages and farms across the south of France and Cornwall, England.

Key works

Untitled Pink tree, Village and Bay (1931)
Scales’s papers held at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington are filled with notes and research into the use of colour in painting. Untitled [Pink tree, Village and Bay] from 1931, shows Scales’s specific and often surprising use of colour. Likely painted in the south of France, Scales has used planes of colour to build the forms of the buildings. This painting is defined by the central, joyous pop of candy-floss pink of the tree at its centre.

Orchard with Plum Tree 1 (1969)
This work is from a series of three paintings of the same theme included in the exhibition, Helen F V Scales, at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1975. The show subsequently travelled to several galleries around Aotearoa New Zealand. Scales’s paintings were often small, but she creates tension and interest in the push and pull of paint across the canvas, as in this work with its multi-green wall of foliage. These greens both compete and blend with each other, and are startled by the white and orange house that draws the eye to the centre of the painting

Still Life, London 1 (also known as Still Life with Oranges) (c. 1970)
As well as landscapes, Scales painted flowers and still lifes, as well as several portraits in her later life. In this work, the oranges and other abstracted elements are tumbled across the table and bright swatches of pink and yellow frame the scene. Viewed alongside its companion work, Still Life, London 2 (c. 1970), of the same subject, Still Life with Oranges demonstrates Scales’s continued experimentation with colour and form, and her ability to look at a subject anew.

Collections

Scales’s work is held in private and public collections throughout Aotearoa New Zealand. The Alexander Turnbull Library is the main repository of her work, and also holds a collection of her notes and papers. Her work is also held in the collections of Auckland Art Gallery Toi ō Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, The Dowse Art Museum, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Hocken Collections—Uare Taoka o Hākena, The Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatū, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Exhibitions

In her early career, Scales exhibited frequently at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington along with several other Art Societies. She did not exhibit in Europe or England, despite spending the majority of her adult life living and working there.

In 1975 Colin McCahon, the then curator at Auckland City Art Gallery, coordinated Scales’s first major solo exhibition, Helen F V Scales. The exhibition went on to travel to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; The Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui; and Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington into 1976.

Scales has frequently been included in exhibitions that address the role and work of women artists. For example, New Zealand Women Artists, Auckland City Art Gallery (1975); Women in New Zealand Society 1884–1958, The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, New Zealand (1985); A Community of Women: Works by New Zealand Women Artists (1900–1989), National Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (1989); Academy Women: A Century of Inspiration, New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts Galleries, Wellington, (1993). In 2018 the Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū staged a solo exhibition of Scales’s work, Flora Scales.

Website

A website dedicated to the Flora Scales’ works can be found here.

Thomasin Sleigh | Ocula | 2022