Tree

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In July 1943 Rita Angus travelled to Greymouth on a sketching trip, and stayed at her sister’s house while the family was away. It was a peaceful interlude and a chance to immerse herself in her work, studying the new landscape, sketching the view of the port and considering ideas for future paintings. Eventually the rain set in, confining her indoors, and she stoked up the fire and sat by the front window. From there she could see the cherry tree, about to break into bud with the onset of spring, which is the subject of one of her finest watercolours.

Tree is a painting of deceptive simplicity, a nearly symmetrical image that has the delicacy and clarity of the Japanese prints that Angus so admired. Three birds perch in the branches, adding a note of animation to the otherwise static scene, while the trunk appears to float above the ground, lending an aura of mystery. The colour scheme is subject to the same restraint that governs the entire image, with a subtle blue wash complementing the warm browns of the tree and foreground.

Angus’s art was always derived from patient, sustained contemplation, and works such as Tree grew out of her fascination with the seasonal rhythms of nature. Her friend Bill Sutton remembered her painting the pear blossom on a bough overlooking her veranda; when the wind blew it to the ground, ‘she just put the painting away until the next blossom season’.1 A solitary and deeply spiritual woman, Angus read classical Chinese texts such as Lao Tzu’s Tao te ching, and was drawn to the Buddhist world view in which all living things are linked in a vast web of interconnection. Her passionate identification with nature often verged on mysticism, and she may have identified with the lone tree in her sister’s garden. From Greymouth she had written to her friend, the composer Douglas Lilburn:
‘I am very fortunate, it is as though my life is in two, I am beginning the second half, with a little wisdom from experience and knowledge, and a little genius. I am free to flower, if only for a few years.’2

Jill Trevelyan

1 Bill Sutton, draft article on Rita Angus, Bishop Julius Hall archive, MB 444/1, Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, Christchurch.

2 Rita Angus, diary-letter to Douglas Lilburn, 29 July-2 August 1943, MS-Papers-7623-052, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.

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This watercolour by Rita Angus was inspired by a tree in her sister's garden in Greymouth. Tree demonstrates the heightened intensity with which Angus perceived objects in the natural environment. This intensity is often conveyed through the clarity of the image and the subtle sense of illumination - an aura - around objects. The painting also illustrates Angus's superb watercolour technique.

A knowledge of art
The central placement of the subject in Tree, which seems to float in space, has overtones of Surrealism, while the simplicity of the composition indicates Angus's interest in Chinese painting. The painting illustrates the kind of clarified formalism that made Angus's work so powerful in the 1930s and 1940s, and which was developed from a diverse knowledge of art, including Canadian painting and contemporary British ideas of modern art.

The meaning of a tree
Angus's landscapes communicated a range of values and meanings to a contemporary audience in New Zealand, especially in terms of a growing interest in national identity. Tree is a simple composition and subject, but still evocative. We might read the starkness of the image, which also captures the beauty and emptiness of the South Island landscape as a reflection of the artist's social isolation - Angus lived alone for most of her life. But there is also a sense of playfulness and optimism in the presence of the birds, which enlivens this otherwise austere symbol.

This is one of Angus's major images, purchased by Te Papa from the Rita Angus Estate.