Doris Lusk

Doris More Lusk (5 May 1916 – 14 April 1990) was a New Zealand painter, potter, art teacher, and university lecturer. As a potter, she was known under her married name Doris Holland. In 1990 she was posthumously awarded the Governor General Art Award in recognition of her artistic career and contributions.

Early life

Lusk was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, on 5 May 1916. She was the daughter of Alice Mary (née Coats), and Thomas Younger Lusk, a draughtsman and architect, and had two older siblings, Marion and Paxton.

The family moved to Hamilton where she went to primary school. An artist who had a studio near the family's home encouraged Lusk to paint. In 1928, the family returned to Dunedin where her father joined the architectural firm, Mandeno and Frazer. Lusk completed one more year at Arthur Street Primary School before attending Otago Girl's High School in 1930.

In 1933, Lusk left high school before she had matriculated, and enrolled in the Dunedin School of Art.

Lusk attended art school from 1934 to 1939. The school was a member of the La Trobe programme which involved bringing practising artists from England to staff New Zealand schools. These artists included W. H. Allen and R. N Field, who both arrived in 1925, and who had a major impact on the Dunedin art scene.

Lusk was taught by J. D. Charlton Edgar and took life classes under Russell Clark in his studio. Through a fellow student, Anne Hamblett, she met Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston.

In December 1942 Lusk married Dermot Holland, and in 1943 the couple moved to Christchurch. Lusk quickly became affiliated with The Group, an association of artists based in Christchurch with ties to artists throughout New Zealand. She had a close friendship with Adelaide and Ian McCubbin – Ian was a construction engineer on the Lake Waikaremoana project.

In 1979, two years before she ceased teaching at the art school, Lusk began a series of works based on buildings in Christchurch's central city that were being demolished in order to build office buildings and apartment blocks.

In Gordon H Brown and Hamish Keith's 1969 book An introduction to New Zealand painting 1839–1967 (the first modern overview of painting in New Zealand) Lusk's work was contextualised with that of artists such as Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, and Toss Woollaston. The authors wrote:

In a number of ways the unpretentious, well-considered and solid qualities of her work summed-up a good deal that was thought to be the best tendencies of the Canterbury painters during this decade. In essence it was straightforward, uncomplicated and while not denying detail when necessary, remained uncluttered. Doris Lusk continued to develop this style through the 1940s and fifties with paintings like Tahananui, Power House at Tuai and Botanical Gardens, Hāwera.

In a 1996 publication accompanying Landmarks: The Landscape Paintings of Doris Lusk, an exhibition of Lusk's work she co-curated, art historian Lisa Beaven disputed this assessment, writing:

An analysis of her art throughout her career reveals a deep fascination with particular motifs, centring around industrial imagery in landscape settings. For more than five decades, Lusk consistently pursued this preoccupation, using different techniques and employing different media. From being the result of random excursions, Lusk's paintings were directed explorations, not just of the relationship between the structures and the land around them, but also of the buildings themselves, and aspects of the juxtapositions of interior and exterior, exposure and concealment, surface and depth. The manifold layers of meaning embedded in the buildings and their role in projecting a certain mood, suggest her painting may profit from being read as expressions of moods, metaphors and symbols. King argued that the negative reception of Lusk's previous 1973 survey exhibition (organised by the Dowse Art Museum and toured to Auckland City Art Gallery) by Auckland critics reflected the, "exclusivity of the canon created in Auckland by critics and curators in the early '70s" and the way art history in New Zealand had been written, "with its focus on Colin McCahon and modernism, on internationalism and abstraction, so that placed within this context, her career appears peripheral." Lusk mainly painted close friends, family and colleagues, along with a small number of commissions and several works painted in the 1970s based on images from newspapers.

In 1947 she began teaching pottery at Risingholme Community Centre with Margaret Frankel, and continued there until 1967. She was president of the Canterbury Potters' Association from 1970 to 1972.

Exhibiting career and retrospective exhibitions

Lusk exhibited mainly with The Group in Christchurch in the 1940s and 1950s.

The first retrospective exhibition of Lusk's work was held at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 1966.

The Doris Lusk Ceramic Residency was established in 2014, and is open to all graduates of the Dunedin School of Art. The residency, worth $2000, allows a ceramicist to spend two weeks teaching at the Risingholme Community Centre. The recipient in 2017 was Kate Fitzharris.

Collections

Examples of Lusk's work are held by most New Zealand public art galleries. Significant works include Tahunanui in the Hocken Collections; Tobacco Fields, Pangatotara, Nelson (1943) and The Pumping Station (1958) at the Auckland Art Gallery; Power House, Tuai (1948), Landscape, Overlooking Kaitawa, Waikaremoana (1948) and Canterbury Plains from Cashmere Hills (1952) at the Christchurch Art Gallery; Akaroa Harbour, Banks Peninsula (1949) in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Further information

Courtney Johnston, Review of Doris Lusk centenary exhibitions, Radio New Zealand, 21 September 2016 Anne Kirker, New Zealand Women Artists: A Survey of 150 Years (1986, Craftsman House)