Desmond W. Helmore

Desmond W. Helmore (born 1940) is a New Zealand artist and illustrator, known both for his fine art and for his scientific work depicting insects, not least illustrating the New Zealand Arthropod Collection. One of the country's most noted and prolific biological illustrators, over 1000 of his illustrations of insects were published in research papers from 1976 to 2006.

Life and education

A 1979 Des Helmore drawing of the weevil Helmoreus sharpi; the genus was named after him.

Helmore was born in Takapau, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, and lived there on a farm until age 12. Interested in drawing since childhood, he attended Christ's College in Christchurch, and then the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury from 1959 to 1962, where he was taught by Rudi Gopas, Russell Clark, and Bill Sutton. At this time Helmore, through beatnik culture, became interested in Zen Buddhism and Taoism. After working in London from 1967 to 1969, Helmore returned to New Zealand and lived in Auckland for over 40 years. From 1971 to 1975 he worked as a graphic artist and graphic designer for NZBC Television and TV1 News in Christchurch, creating lettering, illustrations, and title sequences, but was unhappy with the daily deadlines. The illustrations were created using a stereomicroscope with a camera lucida, and were drawn two to three times larger than final print size on illustration board with technical pens (or sometimes on scraperboard). and "exquisitely executed" by entomologists. The scientist Sir Charles Fleming wrote, "Des Helmore's drawings supply the need for pictures of entire insects felt by many New Zealand amateurs and interdisciplinary students, to an artistic standard few can hope to emulate." Helmoreus, a genus of weevils, is named in his honour, "in recognition of his contribution to New Zealand entomology as a scientific illustrator". In 2014 a species of beetle, Sagola helmorei, was also named in his honour.

Art

Since leaving art school Helmore has continued painting. His work has been described by Dick Frizzell as having a "strangely dense atmosphere" After being influenced by constructivism and cubism in the 1960s, he began painting depictions of rural landscapes after about 1985. Since 2000 his work has focussed on depictions of urban environments.

His work is in a number of collections, including those of Christchurch Art Gallery, the University of Canterbury, the Hocken Library, the Canterbury Society of Arts, and Hawke's Bay Art Gallery.

Publications Deitz, L.L., and Helmore, Desmond W. (1979). "Illustrated key to the families and genera of planthoppers (Homoptera: Fulgoroidea) from the New Zealand sub-region". New Zealand Entomologist'': 7(1). 11–19. (contains 22 drawings of a variety of insects, with additional information about each drawing and an introduction on the purpose of the illustrations.)