Last year in the film festival I saw a movie about Edith Collier, a Wanganui artist of the 1920's who was a friend and fellow painter of Francis Hodgkins and Dorothy Kate Richmond.
What hit me hardest, and the saddest thing; was that once she returned from Europe and London where she explored and mastered her modernst style; she was faced with her community's parochial ideas and her appalled fathers' displeasure at her bold nudes. After an episode where he burnt her paintings, she stopped painting entirely.
It's not just that she stopped that saddened me, but that after she died, the family found a whole trunk of art suppiles she'd gone on collecting throughout her life.
Hopes and dreams embodied in canvas and tubes of paint.
I thought of that today, as I came back to the studio weighed down with the promise of brown paper bags filled with new paint and an arms full of canvasses, and I promised myself to put them to good use, whether or not the results turn out as I hope.
I've been playing with new colours all afternoon. Happy as a sandboy.
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