About the Award
The late Grace Adams, daughter of Grace Butler, set up the Grace Butler Memorial Foundation in recognition of her mother and to give financial assistance to artists or students of art.
For more than four decades Grace Butler captured the light and colour of Waitaha Canterbury and in particular, the Arthur’s Pass region and New Brighton. Her paintings bridged the divide between 19th century landscape painting and modernism in the 1930s. As a woman artist, working in the early decades of the 20th century, Grace Butler’s paintings provided a model for the generation that followed, giving credibility to landscape as an appropriate subject for women artists.
Grace Adams wished to perpetuate the memory of Grace Butler by providing this Award for artists who have an association with Canterbury and whose practice gives consideration to place and environment through the establishment of an artist’s residency. The Award was instituted by the Foundation in 2017 as The Grace Butler Memorial Foundation Award at Ara.
The Award is for a period of three months on a biennial basis to commence at a date to be agreed with the recipient on the year it is conferred. The amount of the Award is determined by the Trustees of the Grace Butler Memorial Foundation and is intended to enable encourage artists or students of art with a proven ability in painting, drawing, design, 3-D work, photography, film or other means of visual communication to focus on the realisation of a body of work free from the need for outside employment.
An application fee of $25 is required at the time of registration.
About Grace Butler
Grace Butler (1886 – 1962) was known for her work as a plain air painter. She spent some forty years painting the Canterbury landscape, particularly around the Arthur’s Pass region and New Brighton. Painting and exhibiting from 1914 to 1960, her work was greatly admired and respected, raising the status of landscape painting as a significant genre and a valid subject for women artists in New Zealand.
Throughout her career, Grace Butler pursued a commitment to plein air painting with an increasing attention to impressionism. Exhibiting at the Canterbury Society of Arts from 1915 until 1960, her paintings of New Brighton and the Arthur's Pass region represent an important link between those landscape painters that tutored her at Canterbury College School of Art (1910 – 1914) and the following generation of women artists whose painting reveal a commitment to an emerging modernism in their response to the Canterbury landscape from the 1930s and '40s.
Butler was born in Invercargill in 1886. Following the death of her father in 1889, her family moved to the North Island, where she attended the Napier Technical School (1903 – 1907). In 1911 she married law clerk, Guy Butler, and they moved to Christchurch where she attended the Canterbury College School of Art, initially tutored by expatriate impressionist painter Sydney Lough Thompson and later, Cecil Kelly and Leonard Booth.
In 1916, she began regularly visiting the Otira region between Canterbury and the West Coast, responding to the mountain ranges and its flora and fauna. In 1923, the Butlers purchased Jack’s Hut, a former road worker’s cabin, four kilometres North of Arthur's Pass. From this time, they made annual and extended visits to the area, as Grace Butler strengthened her commitment to painting out of doors. Her interest in the Arthur's Pass landscape encompassed her attention to the details of its natural biodiversity and its changing light and atmosphere as a means to pursue ‘an inner vision'.
Butler’s dedication to the spectacular nature of the Canterbury landscape and the scale of her paintings in the 1920s provided an example to women artists seeking to work beyond the constraints of ‘feminine’ subjects such as flower painting and botanical studies. Her commitment to her art practice influenced and anticipated artists such as Rata Lovell-Smith, Olivia Spencer Bower and Doris Lusk. Her work is held in the collections of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Te Papa Tongarewa and Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
