Journeying
I had read Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Hal had a job at the Otago University so we bundled up the kids, sold everything and left for New Zealand.1 Els Noordhof
On arrival in this country in early 1967, Dutch-born artist Els Noordhof, then in her early forties, was a skilled teacher, illustrator, committed artist and busy mother.2 Throughout a long and productive art career, exhibiting nationwide throughout New Zealand in solo and group shows, her contribution, apart from numerous newspaper articles, exhibition reviews and scant reproductions, remains largely unacknowledged. Although familiar with the breadth and diversity of her oeuvre, late last year I was delighted to discover an outstanding early self-portrait, other individually distinctive portraits in Dunedin’s Hocken Collections, and an expansive scene of Dunedin, all deserving of wider exposure.
I first met Els as a teenager in 1972, during a Summer Art School in Kurow organised by University of Otago Extension Studies. As the life drawing and figure painting tutor she was popular. This was the heyday of external adult education; aspiring amateurs mingled with several of the country’s most respected artists and the knowledge gained far outlived these week-long courses. From the late 1960s onwards, Els taught at Kurow alongside Doris Lusk, Eileen Mayo, Colin McCahon, Don
