Patricia Marion Dunn (1944-2012) was born in Melbourne into a family with some art background. Her grandfather, George Johnson, was a landscape painter of ability who had worked in the circle of Van der Velden in New Zealand. Her father Laurie Johnson, too, had some artistic ambitions but never pursued his interest in painting because of business commitments. She was introduced to the Old Masters of European painting when a student at Star of the Sea College in Gardenvale where the nuns encouraged her interests in painting and music. While at school she did her first paintings including a still life with a bowl of roses and won an award for a painting of the Beaumaris Bonfire done when she was fifteen. She wrote her schoolgirl diary (as Patty Johnson) between 1957-59 but appears to have told nobody about it. Later at Melbourne University she did a major in Fine Arts taking a particular interest in French painting of the 18th and 19th centuries including flower painting. She came to have a large library of books on flower painting and monographs of admired masters such as Fantin Latour.

 

After her marriage in 1970, Patsy Dunn shifted to Auckland where she taught art and art history at secondary school level, firstly at Rutherford High School but mainly at Auckland Girls Grammar. It was while she was at Rutherford in the early 1970s that she did her first botanical works. She was a charismatic and knowledgeable teacher with an interest in technical processes which she mastered herself, including printmaking and photography. Her intense involvement in teaching left little time for her own work but she did design and plant a large suburban garden in Epsom, at her home in Bracken Avenue, where she grew the camellias, magnolias and roses that were to provide inspiration for her later practice. She began to make studies of flowers and plants and to take photographs of them during the 1970s and 1980s. A number of early examples have survived. Her real focus on botanical art, however, began after she retired from teaching in 1996. She had more time to cultivate her garden, to take photographs and work out an approach to combining her knowledge of art and of flowers to produce her own artworks. She gravitated to those who shared her interests and was encouraged by the botanical artist Brent McGuire who introduced her to some leading English botanical artists, notably Ann Swan from whom she later took lessons in Auckland and London. She acquired an extensive range of books on technique and current practice.

 

For her own work she favoured coloured pencil as a medium because it gave the precision and control she liked. In her works she combined a deep knowledge of the flowers and plants she drew with an artistic sense of design and pattern. All her works were based on specific examples from her garden. Among her first major works is a depiction of an orange canna which she set against a light background giving it a monumental and elegant structure. Her eye for detail was matched by her technical skill where she achieved difficult effects and gradations with apparent ease. No preparation for these works was too demanding, no detail too small to be considered. She was a true perfectionist. Her style can be described as classical in its concern for enduring form and clarity of drawing. She attains accuracy in details of the flowers but is never dry or scientific. There is a true beauty and subtlety in the arrangement, the drawing and the colouring.

 

Patsy Dunn's finest works were done between 2008 and 2010 before her battle with cancer changed her priorities and made each day a struggle. Arguably her masterpiece is the drawing Camellia Japonica, Richard Nixon, 2010. Composed with graceful rhythmic movements, it shows different stages of the flowers and different angles to the viewer while providing a captivating and personal colouristic patterning of white and grey and red. The minute details of veins in the leaves and the presence of the small lady birds adds to its mesmeric quality that demands close viewing to match the intense scrutiny of nature that went into its making. No work sums up more the essence of the artist who sought beauty in nature and her environment and herself gave so much of it to those she knew and cared for. At this period also having acquired a Sanyo digital camera and video recorder she did her major photographic work photographing the plants and flowers of her garden from all angles, at all times and seasons of the year. Again she proved her search for perfection in the range and variety of effects she captured. Her photographs of her Magnolia Campbellii in flower are exceptionally beautiful and varied both individually and collectively. Although Patsy Dunn did exhibit a little at Secondary School Art Sales and at Nathan Homestead, Manurewa, where her works sold readily, she was not interested in the professional art scene from which she increasingly withdrew. She had no need to sell her work which she did for its own sake and for the friends and family to whom she gave reproductions. As a result her work is little known and certainly undervalued. This website is designed to pay tribute to her life, her talent and her beauty as a person. Those privileged enough to live in the presence of one of her botanical works know the enduring pleasure they give which only her perception and skill could make manifest in her depictions of flowers. Through her art teaching, her diary and her botanical art works and photographs she has left a legacy of the things that mattered in her life and that will continue to give pleasure to a new audience.

 

Michael Dunn

Auckland

March 2014

 

List of Botanical Works:

1. Untitled, Delphinium, c. 1972, Patsy Dunn - mixed media on Arches paper, 305 x 196 mm

2. Untitled, Wildflowers, c. 1972, Patsy Dunn - mixed media on Arches paper, 290 x 222 mm

3. Untitled, Camellias, c.1972, Patsy Dunn - mixed media on Arches paper, 147 mm diameter

4. Magnolia Grandiflora, 1992, Patsy Dunn - mezzotint, 160 x 203 mm

5. Canna Indica, June 1999, Patsy Dunn - coloured pencil on Arches paper, 400 x 280 mm

6. Camellia Reticulata Hybrid, June 1999, Patsy Dunn - coloured pencil on Arches paper

7. Magnolia Campbellii, 2000, Patsy Dunn - graphite on Arches paper, 700 x 610 mm

8. Camellia Reticulata, Dream Girl, 2008, Patsy Dunn - coloured pencil on Arches paper, 310 x 220 mm

9. Camellia Japonica, Berenice Boddy, 2009, Patsy Dunn - watercolour on Arches paper, 305 x 270 mm

10. Magnolia Campbellii, 2009, Patsy Dunn - watercolour & pencil, 200 x 280 mm

11. Rustica Rubra: Late September, 2009, Patsy Dunn - coloured pencil on Arches paper, 165 x 245 mm

12. Camellia Japonica, Richard Nixon, 2010, Patsy Dunn - coloured pencil on Arches paper

13. Study for Camellias and Magnolia, 2010, Patsy Dunn - mixed media on Arches paper, 195 x 288 mm

14. Untitled, yellow Poppy, date unknown