A Dame Good Legacy-Louise's Art & Soul

Diane’s search to find her mum’s long-lost paintings

- Lynley Ward

If you were passing through the former Farmers car park in downtown Auckland back in the mid 1980s, there’s a chance you may have come across an elderly lady working feverishly on giant colourful canvases.

The unlikely venue had become a makeshift studio for one of Aotearoa’s most prolific modern artists, Dame Louise Henderson, as she created her monumental series, The Twelve Months.

The dame was in her 80s when she embarked on the ambitious project that depicted impressions of life in New Zealand over a calendar year on a dozen towering canvases, a scale so colossal daughter Diane McKegg (86) recalls the challenges it posed for her trailblazing mum.

“She would ask anyone who was passing to help her turn the work upside down as they were almost twice her height.

“She had to because they were huge paintings. It [the car park] was an ideal place to do it because there was plenty of room for her to work on them, but on the other hand she couldn’t manage them on her own.

“It was an enormous challenge. I remember she was very satisfied when they were finished,” Diane says, adding Louise was 85 when she completed the series in 1987.

Now, more than three decades later, 10 of the 12 paintings are on display at Auckland Art Gallery where the exhibition Louise Henderson: From Life is celebrating seven decades of the late artist’s work. It includes her early water colours featuring the Canterbury landscape, still-life compositions, females depicted in cubism and lush bush scenes.