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The Queen's visit by Ivy Fife
Collection
This article first appeared as 'Hello and goodbye' in The Press on 5 October 2012.
Ivy Fife Queen's Visit 1954
Oil on board Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Christchurch Art Gallery Trust Collection.
Christchurch's first 'proper' railway station on Moorhouse Avenue was designed in 1876–7 by Canterbury Provincial Railway chief engineer James Godfrey Warner. A handsome brick structure with pointed arch doors and windows, it was one of a significant number of buildings in the city to embrace Venetian Gothic, the style drawing inspiration from John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice (1851-3). By 1954, when local artist and teacher Ivy Fife (1905–1976) painted Queen's Visit, the station was tired and much less romantic; its Gothic arches hidden by shed-like, lean-to additions and its brick warmth covered in paint. Ivy Fife's exuberant display of brushwork and colour further obscured the building's original form, with flags, cars and crowds combining to convey the excitement of the arrival of the young, newly-crowned Queen Elizabeth II.
The building was demolished just five years after being painted by Fife, to be replaced by a boldly modern statement by Wellington architect William Gray Young (1885-1962), designer of the Wellington Railway Station. Young's more radical design for Christchurch was inspired by Dutch Modernist architecture (particularly the work of Willem Dudok) and was first presented in 1938, but its construction became delayed by war and its financial aftermath. The new station finally opened in 1960, by which time its avant-garde 1930s origins were more distant and the heyday of the railway had already passed. With its substantial brickwork forms massed into dramatic, asymmetrical blocks including a massive clock tower, it was, however, a landmark enjoyed by many, including in its most recent years as home to Science Alive. Following damage sustained during the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, the decision was made to demolish, which started this month and continues to this moment.
Ivy Fife's painting is readily appreciated for its historical associations, but probably even more so for its bold and painterly lyrical qualities. Queen's Visit was purchased by the Christchurch Art Gallery Trust with funds from the Community Trust and gifted to the Gallery and people of this city in 1996.
Ken Hall
Related reading: Above Ground
Collection
Ivy Fife Royal Visit
A youthful Queen Elizabeth II became the first reigning British sovereign to visit Ōtautahi Christchurch, efficiently arriving (from Te Tai Poutini / the West Coast via Otira and Darfield) at the city railway station with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at exactly 5.45pm, Monday 18 January 1954. The moment inspired a unique response from local artist Ivy Fife, whose deft, expressive mark-making captured something of its excitement and energy. Pictured in warm evening light beneath the distant Port Hills and pitched roofs of the Gothic railway station, a somewhat chaotic scene is held together through strength of colour, composition and brushwork.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
film
Ivy Fife - The Queen's Visit
The Queen arrived in Christchurch on 19 January 1954 at Christchurch Railway Station, the scene depicted in this painting. She then moved up Colombo Street by car through crowds ten deep. Commentator Bernard Kearns describes the scene in Cathedral Square and then at the Clarendon Hotel when the public in Christchurch had their first sight of their new monarch.
Audio supplied by Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision.
Notes
Yertle the Turtle by Glen Hayward
This article first appeared in The Press as 'An Ode to Yertle the Turtle' on 13 May 2015.
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Louise Henderson, Addington Workshops
For many years, the piercing whistle of the railway workshops off Blenheim Road was Addington's alarm clock.
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New exhibition: Shifting Lines
Here's a little from behind the scenes. Shifting Lines opens tomorrow, 9 November, and runs until 19 January 2014. It's a show about drawing as an idea, which is permitted here to take very different forms. It includes work by six artists – Andrew Beck, Peter Trevelyan, Katie Thomas, Pip Culbert, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano – all of whom use line to investigate space and structure in unexpected ways.
Notes
Rooftops, backyards, urban scapes
As a supplement to the article in today's Press GO section, highlighting the recent purchase of Ivy Fife's Untitled (Towards Worcester Street from St. Elmo Courts), here's a modest selection of paintings of rooftops, backyards and urban scapes from the collection...
Notes
Factory at Widnes by L.S. Lowry
This article first appeared in The Press on 13 October 2004
Laurence Stephen Lowry painted Factory at Widnes in 1956, at which time he was Britain's most famous living painter. Lowry's fame increased in that year as he became the subject of a BBC television documentary, though his work had already been popular in British homes and schools as reproductions since the end of the war. If appreciation for his individualistic painting style was widespread, there was also fascination with L.S. Lowry the artist, who had projected in the press the image of a lonely recluse.
Commentary
Above Ground
I go into the Gallery. Haven’t been there in a while. Building closed. It was open to begin with. Civil Defence HQ in the weeks following the shock that laid the city low and who knew glass could be so strong, so resilient? Then the Gallery closed. It was cordoned off, behind wire netting. Something was going on in there. Someone said something had cracked in the basement. Someone said they needed to insert a layer of bouncy forgiving rubber beneath glass and concrete, ready for any future slapdown.
Commentary
City of Shadows and Stories
If cities are the ground into which we plant stories, the soil of Ōtautahi – later Christchurch – is undergoing a protracted tilling season. Five years is a long unsettlement in human terms; on a geological (or indeed narratological) scale, time moves more gradually. Christchurch exists today as a rich aggregation of narratives, propping up physical edifices of crumbling stone and cardboard.
Article
Shifting Lines
It's where we live: the encrusted surface of a molten planet, rotating on its own axis, circling round the star that gives our daylight. Geographically, it's a mapped-out city at the edge of a plain, bordered by sea and rising, broken geological features. Zooming in further, it's a neighbourhood, a street, a shelter – all things existing at first as outlines, drawings, plans. And it's a body: portable abode of mind, spirit, psyche (however we choose to view these things); the breathing physical location of unique identity and passage.
Article
De-Building
For many passers-by, Christchurch art Gallery is identified by its dramatic glass façade—the public face it presents to the world. but De-Building is an exhibition that offers a very different view. bringing together the work of fourteen artists from new Zealand and farther afield, this group exhibition draws inspiration from the working spaces gallery-goers seldom see: the workshops, loading bays and back corridors; the scruffy, half-defined zones.