NEW ZEALAND ARTIST

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 116, 18 May 1944, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND ARTIST

EXHIBITION OF PICTURES (Official News Service.) LONDON, May 16. Mrs. Fraser, wife of the New Zealand Prime Minister, opened a New Zealander's one-man show of pictures portraying Army life in the deserts of the Middle East. The artist, James Bosweli, was born in Hokitika and studied at, the Elam School of Art, Auckland. He came to Britain several years ago. He has been serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps since 1941 in Britain, Irak, Algiers, Malta, and Sicily. The New Zealand Government has bought two of the best paintings. They show better than photograph or printed word the drabness and monotony of desert and Army life behind the line. Mrs. Fraser commented on the excellence of such work by men in the forces who were not official war artists but actually serving soldiers, sailors, and airmen. She referred particularly to work which had gone back to New Zealand from men on duty in the South Pacific theatre and the Middle East, and also paintings and drawings sent forward from prisoners of war in Germany, notably Austin Deans, of Christchurch, and James Welch, of Masterton. A number of Deans's .paintings and Welch's drawings reached London through the Red Cross and some of Welch's work was published recently by the "Daily Express." A consignment of water-colours and oil portraits also came from Captain John Macindoe, of Dunedin, another New Zealand prisoner of war who found art a means of bridging the monotony of three years in enemy hands. The High Commissioner, Mr. Jordan, and Mrs. Jordan were also present at the opening of/ Boswell's show.