of gaiety and spirit

At 70, her art is still full of gaiety and spirit

From MARGARET BAIN, in Suva The genial carrier driver was to be at Mary’s gate 20 miles down the coast from Suva by eight o’clock. “Ask Asgar Ali to come as early as possible on Friday morning,” Mary had said. “He’s a friend of mine,” she added, as an assurance that a message from her would be sufficient. He could be relied on.

“He can’t be there any earlier,” she went on, with obvious con sideration, “because he has to come all the way in from Nausori.”

The collection of 57 paintings, all but 10 new ones, being lent for an exhibition by Mary Edwell-Burke, was to be at the Civic Centre by Friday. Hanging could not begin until the Suva City Council closed its doors for business on Friday evening. And when the staff arrived at work next morning, we must have our stage set, for the curtain was to go up that evening at a preview showing to be opened by the Australian Commis sioner in Fiji.

Later that day I went up the stairs to find her in the gallery. The life size painting “Meke by Night”, and the others completing her list of new work for sale, stood out of the way ready for hanging.

70 years old

My eye caught sight of one of the gayest paintings I have seen: a portrait of a young Fijian girl of slight physique, wearing a sun hat, its wide shady brim laden with hibiscus like a sea of Nature’s multi-colour. In her hand she held an enamel dish of the most delect able-looking tropical fruit, so real one felt almost impelled to reach out and touch it. It had the effect of making one’s mouth water.

I looked from the painting to Mary. How incredible to paint like that when you are over 70 years of age; an age conventionally regarded as old. How incredible to project such unbounded gaiety of eye and spirit.

“I have had an extraordinary life and some of the strangest things have happened to me,” Mary was telling me. “One day as I was walking along an empty road, I heard hurried footsteps running up behind me. The

PIM would have liked to have pub lished a photograph of Miss Mary Edwell- Burke, the subject of the accompanying article. But she is one of the most camera-shy people in the Pacific and refuses to have her photograph taken.

A colour photograph of Miss Edwell- Burke's painting "Hibiscus Hat" is our cover picture for this month.

next thing I knew, a blow had struck me across the top of my back, just below my neck. I swung round with amazement to see a young woman, “ ‘You too old’, the young woman said, emphasising each word delibera tely, with contempt and anger in her face and voice, as if I had no right to still be living and upright. And with that, she walked on! Incredible!”

Mary Edwell-Burke’s Suva ex hibition was a great success, aesthetically and financially. The Civic Centre provided a setting to be proud of, the fine paintings—rang ing in variety and colour from tiny floral miniatures, garden landscape, the Fijian people in traditional and modern dress, to life-size portraits of leading public figures of today and yesterday—were fittingly com plemented by exotic tropical flowers and foliage arranged by the floral group of the Suva Orchid and Horticultural Circle. It raised over $2OO for the YWCA Building Fund.

Home to stay

Born in Australia, Mary Edwell- Burke first came to Fiji in 1933.

Since then she has made 24 arrivals and departures, and now, she says, she is home to stay. She now lives at Delai Talei (Mount Pleasant), on the Queen’s Road, near Suva.

There she has a studio where she has cut back the bush, having survived the rigours of living in

the open in a tent for many months.

Bullocks levelled the land for the house.

She tells the story of the approach of her 11th birthday, and when asked what she would like, she had replied in deadly earnest: “A box of the best oil paints, and”, she had added emphatically, “to be left alone —with no messages to do”.

A vivid childhood memory is of being held up to ridicule at school when her turn came in the class to say what she would like to be when she grew up.

“I want to be an artist,” she had answered innocently enough, only to have the fury of her teacher un leashed upon her and a lecture on the absurdity of such an idea.

Garden lover

She has always been a garden lover and she recalls an incident when her mother chided her: “It’s time you got to your easel; you have wasted the whole morning in the garden”.

What her mother didn’t realise, Mary explains, was that “I had been mentally painting all morning as I enjoyed myself in the garden, and now I was ready to paint at my board”.

From the age of 13i, on the advice of an eminent art teacher, she was taken away from school and began four years’ full-time art school studies in Australia. Later, at the age of 18, her mother took her first to England and then to Paris where she studied as a sculptor and a painter at the Academic Colorossi.

At the age of 19, she submitted a portrait of a Russian woman and had it accepted at the annual ex hibition of the Paris Salon. This was in 1914, when the outbreak of war was looming large, when the im pressionists Cezanne, Monet and Renoir, were living and painting in Europe—doubtless in Paris, too.

“If any one artist influenced my work, it wasn’t any of those artists, but Whistler—l admired him deeply for his fine portraiture, and particu larly for the famous portrait of his mother,” she says.

“It was the distinguished ""artists of the stage, like Pavlova and Sara Bernhardt, whom I believe influenced my work. The exquisite grace of Anna Pavlova (then 31), I recall seeing in London with Harry Lauder and a vast array of wonderful talent, the whole thing for a shilling!

“If anything influenced me—and a lot did—the only performance I saw of Sara Bernhardt influenced me more than anything else. A great tragic actress; such sensitivity you

could not imagine. I dreamed of bringing that sort of thing into my work.

“I remember as a child that she was such a famous and revered artist when she visited Sydney that to do her honour they took the horses away and pulled her carriage bodily!

“I am first a Christian Scientist; secondly a painter. I don’t say I am as good a Christian Scientist as I should be, but I do make an effort to be as good a one as I can humanly be. I approach my subjects from the angle of my religion. It doesn’t mean that one sees people as dull— rather the reverse.

“If you look through my paintings, you will not see evil qualities. That is not because I ignore evil; but an artist cannot paint a portrait of somebody and put in evil even if the sitter displays evil, because if you did this you would have to leave out the good.

“You must keep to the positive in portraiture as far as the subject will allow. You don’t make a person look like a saint when he is not; but you don’t put evil in and leave out his dignity and other qualities. Each of my paintings is statement in its own right; although they may be dressed

alike, there is a totally different state ment.”

Mary Edwell-Burke’s work has been purchased by collectors all over the world. In Australia, seven paintings were purchased by the Trustees of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, several by the Brisbane National Gallery, and others by the National Gallery of Adelaide.

Nine paintings were purchased by the Howard Hinton Benefaction at Armidale.

She was the first woman to be commissioned to paint a portrait for the Australian Commonwealth Gov ernment; later, she was commissioned by the Bar Association of New South Wales to paint a portrait of the Chief Justice of New South Wales, then Sir Frederick Jordan. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales.

Tahiti exhibition

Her particular love has been to paint dark-skinned people. She has lived in India, Ceylon, Java, Bali, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Canada, Norfolk Island and Tahiti.

She has painted the people of these countries in addition to those in Australia, France and Fiji.

At the age of 21, she held her first “solo” exhibition at the invitation of the French Governor and the British Consul at the British Consulate in Papeete, Tahiti. The entire exhibi tion was sold out and the Governor bought a large painting for Govern ment House.

Mary’s dream is that one day her property of 5J acres on the Queen’s Road will be a beautiful garden where people from all over the world will come to see the arts of the country being practised and taught— not in a 20th century style building, but in small bures in the local style.

It’s her dream to provide a simple retreat where artists can come to rest and paint.

Is it possible in her own lifetime?

“Why not?” she says. “After all, Mary Baker Eddy founded The Christian Science Monitor at the age of eighty-nine!”

Of her great love for painting the Fijian people, Mary expresses herself in these words: “Although at times I am exasperated, to me they are like the deep notes of a piano and I find those rich notes satisfying.

Nothing gives me more aesthetic pleasure than to hear the resonance and depth in the Fijian singing; there is a depth there that I have found in no other race. I cannot stay away from Fiji.”