Aratoi director Alice Hutchison remembers clearly the period in the 1980s when her mother Philippa Blair was painting ‘Heart Book’ and other vivid, ‘deconstructed' canvases, many of them crossing into sculpture and installation in their commanding scale.
“I was a teenager at the time and she would always have a dialogue with me about what she was making. It was natural for us to talk about art and I spent time in the studio from a young age. All these years later I’m still doing the same thing!” she says.
‘Heart Book’ features in the current Rutherford Trust Collection exhibition, and Alice will today be talking about the innovative work and her artist mother, who she describes as “a force of nature”, as part of Aratoi’s lunchtime free ‘Art Bites’ series.
Living in Christchurch at the time, Philippa was teaching at Ilam and Alice attended Christchurch Girls’ High School. There was a large home studio, and Philippa's discipline and energy were to the fore as she juggled parenting with her teaching role and an “intense” studio practice.
“I think her incredible discipline came from her parents,” says Alice. “Her mother, Grace Blair, was a soprano singer and her father Dr I.D. Blair was a microbiologist who taught at Lincoln College."
Coupled with this were her prodigious talent and a “captivating persona” that propelled her forward to become one of New Zealand’s leading artists. She had sojourns in Australia, the U.S. and Europe, building relationships with peers and gallerists, and feeding international influences into her work.
“She was represented by Rodney Kirk Smith in Auckland, and also exhibited in Wellington with long-time gallerist Janne Land who both nurtured her as a professional artist,” says Alice. “It was rare for a New Zealand woman artist at the time to achieve that level of support here.”
At an artists’ panel discussion in Los Angeles in 2009, Philippa Blair commented: “From a young age, my children were aware and respected their mother’s work ethic and commitment to her art….. There is osmosis both ways [between an artist and her children], through ideas, humor, curiosity, new subject matter, travel, and more. The everyday working artist and teacher is exhausted a lot of the time, but having children can help, inspire, relax, and excite the imagination.”
Art Bites at Aratoi, Wedsnesday 5 August, 12pm-12.15pm.
SIDEBAR: Career notes
Philippa Blair was born in 1945 and studied at Ilam School of Arts, University of Canterbury. She had her first solo exhibition in Brisbane in 1969. She cited Len Lye, explaining a shared fascination with the concept of forms as the product of movement and dynamic forces. One writer pointed out that she combined drawing, painting and sculpture all in one work.
Philippa Blair, Heart Book, 1984, Acrylic on canvas. Rutherford Trust Collection on loan to Wallace Arts Trust.
Wairarapa Museum of Art and History