Artistic responses of Evelyn Page

Press, 20 December 1986, Page 23

Artistic responses of Evelyn Page

Evelyn Page: Seven Decades. By Janet Paul and Neil Roberts. Robert McDougall Art Gallery/Allen and Unwin, 1986. 104 pp. Illustrations. $32.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Julie King)

An apple in a bowl, a nude on the

grass ripen in sunlight; for seven decades the painting of Evelyn Page has celebrated the senses. Her cityscapes are vibrant with people and her seascapes with coloured sails; in the still-lifes at her table wine flows from the carafes and the fruit bowl stays full. She has cultivated a world where the good things in life flourish and are protected, unbuffeted by nor’westers or Wellington’s southerlies. Questions therefore which stand out, are how does her work relate to art in New Zealand and to the artist’s experience of her time and place. In “Seven Decades,” the successful complement of a biographical essay by Janet Paul and an historical analysis by Neil Roberts provides their answers. Both writers describe the artist’s strong individuality and her independence from the mainstream of painting in New Zealand. Born in 1899, trained at the Canterbury College School of Art, Evelyn Polson as she was before her marriage to Frederick Page in 1938, was a founding member of The Group in 1927. The Group, in its first year, was made up predominantly of women who worked and showed together, giving mutual support, but holding no unifying doctrine apart from the development of their art in an independent way.

Evelyn Page’s. originality came through in figure painting in “December Morn” where light filters through leaves, falls on flesh and flickers on water. Technically, as Roberts explains, her initial direction with her observation of light might

well have been developed from the teaching of Nicoll and Kelly at Canterbury. Sydney Thompson had taken classes in painting the figure out of doors after his return from France in 1923, and in 1925 he had exhibited such joyous impressionistic works as his “Woman in White” now at Dunedin. Both Thompson and Page are two of New Zealand’s subtle and sensuous colourists. In 1938, Evelyn and Frederick returned from Europe, married, and made their home at Waitahuna on the Peninsula. Here they cultivated their garden, put down roots, talked, played music and painted. It was here that Charles Brasch came for sustenance, wrestling with the familiar malaise of cultural identity. As he wrote in “Indirections,” “Evelyn painted, Frederick played, there were friends who brought fresh good talk and laughter. It was New Zealand; and what more could I have looked for in Europe?” Meanwhile, over the Port Hills, the stony river beds and yellow tussock of the dry Canterbury Plains made fertile ground for Kelly, the LovellSmiths, and Angus. Fairburn had forged a national aesthetic from “our hard clear light” and “the natural bleakness of our manmade scenery.” In New Zealand painting of this time,

a sense of absence hums along the lonely telegraph poles. From Evelyn Page, however, at their home at Waitahuna, came a different response to the time in her bold, colourful paintings of the harbour and bays, all activated by human presence.

After moving to Wellington, the Pages began to make a second home and grow another garden at Waikanae from the end of the 19405. Waikanae and the garden became a setting for her paintings in subsequent decades; colour and form flowed from her brush in a succession of interiors, stilllifes, portraits and nudes. The conventions of her painting came from France and a British understanding of French PostImpressionist art. The time is right, however, with New Zealand art history having outgrown a perspective and ranking order based on aspirations for a national style, to widen the number of artists owed consideration and to analyse the complexity of their responses to working here. The sensuous painting of Evelyn Page does not conveniently fit into the framework of regionalism which developed from the end of the 19205. She looked at different conventions of European painting and adapted them differently to her experience of putting down roots and making her' home and garden at Waitahuna nd Waikanae. Janet Paul and Neil Roberts present the distinctiveness of her response in their catalogue; appropriately it is generously illustrated with colour illustrations.