Obituary: Artist Philippa Blair

Renowned artist Philippa Blair died at the Waimarie Private Hospital in Auckland on Sunday 5 January 2025.

Philippa, who was a painting tutor at the Elam School of Fine Arts in 1993-1994, studied Art History at the University of Auckland from 1973 and completed her Diploma of Teaching at the Auckland College of Education in 1976. The Tree of Knowledge, which was commissioned for Level 5 of the Arts/Commerce building (Building 206) in Symonds Street in 1984 is one of her major works in a New Zealand public art collection.

Committed to gestural painting, Philippa was a dedicated artist whose exhibiting career spanned 55 years. Her energetic painting, like her extroverted personality, was a feature of the New Zealand art scene for decades. Her work is held in 46 public and private collections in the United States, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand, including the private collection of the late musician David Bowie, the Australian National Gallery and the Long Beach Museum of Art in California, a testament to her significance as a major artist.

Born in Christchurch, she completed her Diploma in Fine Arts at the School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, then married and moved to northern Hawke’s Bay where she taught art at Wairoa College. Her move to Australia in 1969 at the age of 24 saw her included in the survey exhibition Young Contemporaries in Brisbane, and becoming a finalist in the David Jones Art Prize. Daughter Alice was born in 1970 and Taisha in 1972.

On her return to Auckland, she joined the New Vision Gallery, exhibiting her paintings in the space in His Majesty’s Arcade off Queen Street which was run by Dutch emigres Kees and Tine Hos. By the early 1980s she was exploring lithography and painting on both sides of unstretched canvas to create draped and hung forms which she exhibited with the Denis Cohn Gallery between 1978 and 1986 and later Rodney Kirk Smith’s gallery RKS. Adventurous and ambitious, she explored a range of media, making stained glass windows for a Cook Island church in Otara and a large mural for the Aotea Centre.

While she was included in a number of all-women exhibitions in the 1980s, she railed against being typecast as a feminist artist, pointing to her painterly concerns when she declared, “I am interested in the idea of metamorphosis literally and symbolically. Changing states as a metaphor of life and as a physical fact, breaking barriers between 2D and 3D work”.

She returned to her hometown of Christchurch in 1985, as a visiting lecturer at the School of Fine Arts, and mounting two large solo exhibitions: Big Paintings in the Mair Gallery at the Canterbury Society of Arts and A Tree Has its Heart in its Roots at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.

Her first Arts Council Grant took her to the US and Germany in 1981, and a second in 1984 facilitated travel to France, Spain and Portugal in 1985. Studying American Indian culture during that first American visit, she was attracted by the Navajo acknowledgement of life cycles, where shapes and symbols are used to invoke ideas of spiritual transformation.

Returning to New Zealand, she began painting on both sides of her canvases to form portable and protective tipis and cloaks. In conjunction with her gallerist Rodney Kirk Smith, curator Mary Vavasour created an exhibition surveying her work from the tent paintings of 1985 through to the cloak paintings in 1987 at the Fisher Gallery in Pakuranga. An Air New Zealand travel award that same year funded a return trip to the US and another sent her to Italy in 1988 which cemented her resolve to exhibit more widely internationally.

In 1990, the Long Beach Museum of Art organised the exhibition Three from New Zealand which put her work alongside that of Christine Hellyar and Ralph Hotere. In 1995, she moved to Southern California where she shared a studio with her second husband, the architect and painter John Rolf Porter (1941-2018), first in Venice Beach and then in San Pedro. Rob Gardiner of the Chartwell Collection selected her work for a survey exhibition at his gallery the Centre for Contemporary Art in Hamilton in 1992, and she was chosen for the exhibition Flow: 11 Californian Painters at the Riverside Museum in California in 2005.

While sometimes motivated by political or humanitarian concerns, her work was never didactic. Instead, in her uniquely personal responses to troubling situations, Philippa Blair deployed a full arsenal of expressionist techniques.
Described by one critic as ‘crashing against each other like a multi-car pile-up’, her gestures dance with the power of the unconscious to relay the import of an issue and its cultural, historical and spiritual significance.

By Associate Professor Linda Tyler