Punakaiki seas

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

Olivia Spencer Bower was born at St Neots, England, and came to New Zealand at the age of fourteen. The daughter of New Zealand watercolourist Rosa Spencer Bower, she had been introduced to drawing and painting in her childhood, and had a clear understanding from early on that she would become a painter. She received every encouragement to develop her talent, and after attending classes at the Canterbury College School of Art, where fellow students included Ngaio Marsh, Evelyn Page and Rhona Haszard, she left in 1929 for further study in Europe. In France she painted briefly with Sydney Lough Thompson at Concarneau, and she later made a visit to Italy. In London she studied at the Slade School of Art, where her mother had been a student, and attended classes at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art.

During her years abroad she began to approach her work in a modern manner, simplifying forms and flattening space, and organising her composition around linear patterns and arrangements of
colour and tone. Shortly after her return to New Zealand in 1932, the artist and critic Roland Hipkins described her way of painting as one in which she ‘rearranges the visual elements of nature’, interpreting landscape by ‘choosing the shapes and lines which are significant, and emphasising them, even to the point of suggesting an abstract rather than a naturalistic rendering’.1

Punakaiki seas is one of a group of paintings inspired by the wild and brooding landscape at Punakaiki on the West Coast of the South Island which Spencer Bower produced between 1934 and 1942. Recalling her fascination with the place, and with the artistic challenge presented by the sea’s movement, and the turn and sweep of breaking waves, she described these works as ‘design pieces’.2 In Punakaiki seas, simplified modern forms create the pictorial structure, with dark hills and menacing sky providing a layered backdrop for the ongoing contest between sea and buttressed land. The weathered rocks sculpted by the tide have something anthropomorphic about them, suggesting a link with relentless natural forces, and evoking a sense of solitude. Such a theme was a new departure for Spencer Bower, and it provided her with the opportunity to draw on different traditions, including Japanese prints, in her development of a modern landscape.

Julie King

1 Roland Hipkins, ‘The spring exhibition of the New Zealand Academy of Arts’, Art in New Zealand, vol. 5, no. 18, December 1932, p. 78.

2 Olivia Spencer Bower, quoted in Alison Mitchell, Olivia Spencer Bower retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, 1977, unpaginated.