Pohutukawa Rina: A Day in the Sun.

Jane Sayle, College of Fine Arts & Design, Massey University at Wellington

J.Sayle@massey.ac.nz

In 1930 Evelyn Page painted two nude women in the sun talking together underneath a tree on a rocky Northland beach. The way in which the elements are represented in this painting - of wholeness, nakedness, water and sunlight create a picture of womanliness strongly in and for itself.

The ideal forms of the female bodies in Pohutukawa Rina contrast with other representations of the body being produced by local women at this time, when what became known subsequently as a New Zealand 'national identity' was being defined and authorised. Women writers and painters more typically represented themselves as partial; mutilated, besieged and undone. This could be called their authorised role within our modernist canon.

My reading of this beach scene aims to show that although the beach is a site where creative New Zealand women routinely go to look for themselves, Page, an artist whose reputation has suffered because of her focus on the figure, has here made an image radical for its depiction of a female wholeness that is not fragmented, compromised or painful. This vision of wholeness, far from being regressive, helps to delineate, and stands counter to, the parameters of the masculinist nation building project in the 1930s and to shed light on the far from ideal shape of women within it.