Who Brings

A Painter

The Markets

To Life

From Beryl Cates, in Suva

Fiji’s Kitty Burns (her friends call her Kate), is a woman sin gularly without temperament in the accepted sense. Extremely serious about her art, she gives the appearance of rarely, if ever, being ruffled even. She claims the appearance is false. Casual in dress and manner, she and her husband spend most of their leisure hours swimming or riding with their family.

But Fiji’s art lovers are aware of the talent in their midst in the per son of Kitty—in private life Mrs.

Leonard MacKeon. The artist’s name is known well beyond Fiji. Her works hang in private collections all over the world. Murals by her are in Edinburgh Theatre, and in the High Court and a theatre building in Dar es-Salaam.

Two private collectors in the US are sent—at their request—colour slide photographs of those works the artist considers will interest them, and to date they have bought 14 paintings.

Private gallery

Tourists and Fiji residents take the opportunity to possess original Kitty Burns painting by keeping check of what the artist has in her private art gallery in her home in Tamavua, Suva. The art gallery is the only one in Suva.

Prices for the works are high by Fiji standards, but are considered bargains by purchasers. One large contemporary oil, Coconuts, was sold to an American customer for £l2O. In Tanzania, where the artist first began producing work of note, buyers happily paid up to £3OO for her work.

Kitty Burns began her art career when as a Wren in England she won

an amateur water colour competition sponsored by the London Society of Art, as a result of which she was given a grant to study for four years at Edinburgh Art College. The prize -

winning painting now hangs in the Imperial War Museum, London.

After graduating she taught art for 12 months and then married a fellow Scot. They went to Africa with its hard, vivid colours, its lush plant life and intriguing people, and here her talents developed and broadened, and buyers began asking for her works.

Later, while living in Dar-es- Salaam she was asked to do the murals for the theatre and High Court building. On leave from Africa two compositions of African life were accepted for exhibition in the Royal Academy, and a further paint ing accepted by the British Arts Council for exhibition.

After leaving Africa the family went first to Aden and then to Spain with the idea of settling permanently in the latter country. Spain, how ever, disappointed them. They re turned to Scotland and then later made their way to Fiji.

Stylised and selective in drawing and composition, she is nevertheless at her best expressing herself on large canvases. She is a colourist who uses brilliant reds, warm browns and tans and off whites.

Usually her works reflect the Fiji scene, and in particular its heat, noise and colour, and as often as not the patience of its people.

Country scenes and individuals absorb her, but she is perhaps at her best when painting scenes and subjects from Suva’s noisy, colourful markets.

Kitty Burns preparing one of her paintings for dispatch to a customer in America.

This painting sold for $240.