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Someone at the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society saw her work and asked her to illustrate cards for them. Someone else at New Zealand Post saw the cards and commissioned stamps with bird images – eventually she also produced 24 featuring butterflies and tuatara.
Pauline’s bird paintings are painstakingly detailed – taking up to two months to complete – with a price tag that’s started to reflect that. Five pictures have been sold to an American collector who also has work by bird artists Raymond Ching and Robert Bateman on his walls. But Pauline has held on to some of her original bird paintings and plans to keep them.
These days her passion and talent have been diverted into landscape painting. She often finds her subjects in the neighbourhood of her home in Pukerua Bay, a small seaside community north of Porirua; what she sees is refined until she can reproduce its essence on canvas.
These landscapes have a subtle conservation message. One image captures the hills at the back of the bay, with the last remnants of bush cupped in the bare folds of earth. Of two smaller companion paintings, one focuses on two kahikatea trees – all that is left of a native forest – while the other depicts sculptural, tortured shapes of macrocarpa and pine. Quirky, angular hill forms are a favourite preoccupation.
Pauline works from home, in an eyrie of a studio that overlooks the steep coast and Kapiti Island. She has lived there, she says almost apologetically, for 30 years, since she was in her early 20s and fell in love with the place as a bare paddock. Her original tiny Lockwood house has been extended beyond recognition and the bare paddock has been turned into a green and fragrant garden.
New Zealand natives, English cottage garden plants and a serenely ordered corner inspired by a trip to China create an inspirational setting – just the place for an artist with an eye for the bigger picture.
Story: Diana Dekker
Photographs: Paul McCredie
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