Sleeping

A. Lois (pronounced ‘Loyce’) White was born into a middle-class Methodist family from Auckland. Her biographer, Nicola Green, has noted, ‘Throughout her life Lois struggled to reconcile two sides of her personality: the God-fearing dutiful daughter and the creative artist.’[1] She trained at the Elam School of Art from 1923 to 1927 and went on to tutor there from 1928 to 1963. She was influenced by diverse artists, from the Old Masters of the European tradition to the Cubists and other modernist painters.

During the 1930s and 1940s, she was a prominent figure in the Auckland art scene, but she grew to be critically undervalued, both because her style was not thought particularly avant-garde, and because her preferred subject-matter was not comfortingly local. Following her rediscovery by Te Whanganui-a-Tara gallerist Peter McLeavey in the 1970s, and the staging of a major touring exhibition in the 1990s, her paintings came to be recognised for their idiosyncratic poetry.

White’s work looks and feels like that of no other artist from Aotearoa (though there are resonances with figures such as May Smith, Margaret Thompson, James Turkington, and George Woods). None of her contemporaries embraced the rhythmic compositions associated with Art Deco as passionately or thoroughly as she did. None was as dedicated to experimenting with the type of the ‘history painting’.

Sleeping is a fine example of the allegorical or symbolic works for which White is best known. The composition is beautifully calibrated to the subject-matter of sleep and (by implication) dreams. The foreground undulations, the flanking trees of a similar hue, and the voluptuous mountains in the far distance form a womb-like pictorial frame, reinforcing the mood of security and serenity that permeates the work.

Human and animal subjects are elegantly integrated with one another and their surroundings. The cool moonlight is exquisitely evoked, its delicate play across the faces of the sleeping figures especially well realised. The image is sensual, even bordering on erotic (consider, for instance, the excited forms of the tree at left and the yearning branches of the one at right). Yet this is not in any sense an explicit painting. It is subtly coded, welcoming complex and multiple responses.

Sleeping is undated, but it is likely a relatively late work, since it is painted on canvas board, lacks the stippling typical of earlier pieces, and includes figures with more robust physical features. A similar work, Sleep, is dated 1958. Given the greater confidence of Sleeping, it is possible that it was made after the artist’s first and only European excursion in 1961. She travelled in the company of Ida Eise, who was her teacher and later colleague at Elam, her lifelong friend, and possibly a romantic partner.

[1] Nicola Green, ‘Biography: White, Anna Lois’, Te Ara The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4w13/white-anna-lois.

[2] Nicola Green, By the Waters of Babylon: The Art of A. Lois White (Tāmaki Makaurau: Auckland City Art Gallery/David Bateman, 1993), 109.