Untitled [Mousehole, Cornwall]

Helen Flora Scales was an independent, searching artist who lived between Europe and New Zealand, unshackled from any one national art history. In the early 1950s, she spent time in Cornwall, where she recalled hearing Barbara Hepworth’s hammering as she passed the sculptor’s studio in St Ives. Ten miles south, in the coastal village of Mousehole, Scales captured scenes of the bay with uncompromising concision and sensitivity to colour and form. Speaking to researcher Barbara de Lange in 1983, Scales recalled living in ‘a horrible yellow house in Mousehole’. The yellow house seen in Untitled [Mousehole, Cornwall] could be the one she was referring to. The derrick is the focal point of the composition and a tool for the construction of dynamic pictorial space. Scales's use of the V-shape is one of several examples in her work which demonstrate the way she assimilated the teachings of Hans Hofmann. In 1976, Scales held her first major solo exhibition, Helen F V Scales, at Auckland City Art Gallery with one reviewer describing the painting as ‘charming in an unimportant sort of way’. Such assessments were likely of little consequence to a painter as independent and singularly focused as Scales – for soon she was off again, returning to her beloved France later that year.

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