Valerie Heinz

Biography
Record of Work

Valerie Olga Heinz (1928- 2022)

Artist and teacher, Valerie Heinz, belongs to the generation of women artists from the 1920s to late 1960s, who graduated from New Zealand’s schools of fine arts with a given understanding that they were graduates from a ‘finishing school,’ - trained to become teachers rather than at the beginning of professional careers as practicing artists.

For Heinz, this encompassed a professional and active engagement with the visual arts over 70 years, complemented and compromised to a certain extent, over 28 years as a secondary school teacher. Interviewed by journalist Anna Dunbar in 2000, Heinz reflected that it was much harder for women painters to make a stand in those days: ‘Looking back I wish I had been bold enough to take more time off.... It also seemed my male colleagues could somehow still manage to produce enough work to hold solo exhibitions every few years.... I feel now as if I am back to knowing what I want to do...[and] I am raring to go.’

Valerie Heinz was born in Greymouth and sustained an important relationship throughout her life with the West Coast’s flora and fauna and its rain forests.

Unlike many Canterbury painters, (Rita Angus or Doris Lusk for example), whose focus was on a wider view grounded in the notion of New Zealand’s strong Pacific light, Heinz’ response to the landscape was more intimate, all-embracing and about the presence of humanity being in the land.

Dr. Warren Feeney

1944-48 Canterbury School of Art
1944 Louise Lonsdale Prize, awarded for junior life work
1954-56 Summer Contemporary Exhibition, Rarity Gallery, Mykonos
1957-1986 Taught at Christchurch Girls' High School. Became head of Art Department
1963 Award, Hay Competition, Christchurch

Work in Public Collections

Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch
Anderson Park Gallery, Invercargill
Canterbury Society of Arts collection.

Group Exhibitions

1950 Canterbury Centennial Living Artists Exhibition
1949-69 Exhibited in Society of Arts Annual Exhibition, Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin, Invercargill
1975-93 Exhibited in invitation group shows at the C.S.A
1975 Exhibited in the Christchurch-Kurashiki (sister city) Exhibition in Japan
1993 White Camellias, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, One Hundred Years on Canterbury Women's Artmaking
2002 Anderson Park Gallery, Invercargill, featured artist