Helen Flora Victoria Scales

Helen Flora Victoria Scales (1887–1985) was a notable New Zealand artist. She was born in Lower Hutt, Wellington, New Zealand in 1887.

Early life Flora Scales was born in Te Awakairangi ki Tai Lower Hutt, in Aotearoa New Zealand. She was the second-born, eldest daughter in a well-off, influential family of five children. Her position of privilege afforded her a good education and opportunity to explore her interest and talent for art.

At the age of 16, Scales was sent to Christchurch to attend the Canterbury College School of Art.

In 1908 Scales left New Zealand to study painting in England with animal painter William Frank Calderon. In 1911 her Cattle mustering in New Zealand was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Career Her father died in 1928, leaving her a small legacy that allowed her to concentrate on painting. Dissatisfied by the teaching at the academy, Scales travelled to Munich where she attended Hans Hofmann's art school, and over the winter of 1932–33 studied Hofmann's principles of modernism with Edmund Kinzinger.

Art In her early years, Flora Scales painted landscapes, seascapes, boats, and other rural work and activities. In her more mature work, she continue to paint the places she lived and the natural environment around her: landscapes, interior still lifes, studies of flowers, and a few portraits. Throughout her life, she loved to paint outdoors.

Her paintings from the 1930s in and around the Mediterranean show villages overlooking the sea, often framed, or interrupted, by trees and fields, and empty of people. In later work, the structures in her paintings become less distinct, and a building is often rendered by a few loose brushstrokes that melt into its surroundings. For example, Church at Bry-sur-Marne from 1960, where the spire of a church is subtly suggested by the cone of grey paint in the background. Or, Boarding House, St Ives, Cornwall (1968–1970), where the white boarding house blends with the sea and rock around it.

Scales would paint multiple paintings of a subject or scene, taken from different angles, and exploring different compositions and palettes. For example, she painted a series of works about a plum orchard in Bry-sur-Marne in France, between 1969 and 1970. Though they were painted in the same location, and there are some shared motifs (a V form recurs), these paintings are very different from each other, and demonstrate Scales's varied visual vocabulary and continued experimentation with form, colour, and light.

Collections Works by Scales are held in the permanent collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery, The Dowse Art Museum and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A catalogue raisonné is available online.