Figures at Night 1950

This early painting was created in Wellington when Douglas MacDiarmid came back from Europe for a year and was experimenting with different mediums. The scene is a bridge in Bowen Street, looking up Parliament Street; the woman could be Helen Hitchings, then his constant companion, but Douglas says the other figure is not him.

The scene is described in Dr Nelly Finet’s art history MacDiarmid 2002: “Human solitude and poverty of communication are concentrated in this couple; nothing in their night seems likely to bring them nearer. However, on the hillside, two street lights flame like torches in the obscurity and provide a note of hope. MacDiarmid is no neurotic pessimist. Life is what counts.”

Now a snapshot in time, the buildings in the background have long given way to progress under the city motorway.

Figures at Night was exhibited in his first commercial one-man show at Helen Hitchings Gallery, in a converted warehouse in Bond Street in 1950. At the time, Douglas was working at the Alexander Turnbull Library, cataloguing international reference material because of his smattering of European languages, as well as broadcasting on Radio 2YA as a newsreader, announcer and radio play actor.

There is considerable interest in these early paintings, because they were unlike work typically being done in New Zealand at the time. The ongoing focus on his early work frustrates Douglas enormously – almost as if he painted nothing more or better in the next six decades as an international artist who couldn’t keep up with the demand for his work in France, when in fact he continued to push creative boundaries into his 90s!