Rita Angus - Art

Art

Among Rita Angus' influences were Byzantine art and cubism. She was also influenced by the English painter Christopher Perkins' 1931 painting of Mount Taranaki, a response to New Zealand's distinctive clear lightning.

Her landscapes came in a time when many people were concerned to create a distinctly New Zealand art, and the American regionalism movement was growing. Angus herself was not interested in defining a national style so much as her own style. Her paintings are clear, hard-edged and sharply-defined. In the 1930s and 1940s she painted scenes of Canterbury and Otago. One of the most famous of these is Cass (1936) in which she portrayed the bare emptiness of the Canterbury landscape using simplified forms and mostly unblended colours arranged in sections in a style remiscent of poster art. In the 1960s, settled in Wellington, her landscapes focused on this area. Boats, Island Bay is one such iconic painting.

Although perhaps best known for her landscapes, Angus also painted a large number of portraits. These include Head of a Maori Boy (1938) and Portrait (Betty Curnow) (1942). She was able to capture the personality of her subjects, moving beyond a mere representation of their form. Her many portraits of women expressed her feminist ideas. She also painted 55 self-portraits at different stages of her life, showing her passing years and changing emotions. Angus devoted much of 1960 to the painting of a mural at Napier Girls' High School which can now be seen at the front of the school hall.