Style: June 16, 2020

24 STYLE | art
SOUL DANCE
Heather Brown was a busy business owner. But bubbling beneath was
her artist’s soul waiting to be released. She talks to Shelley Robinson about her
latest exhibition and finding her ‘soul dance’.
For hours on end, Heather Brown will work. Frenetically
stroking layers of paint in sweeping motions across her
canvas. Clad in her slippers and pyjamas, she had only intended
to pop across the driveway to her studio for a moment. But
when she reemerges from the place she goes to create, she
realises the day has slipped away.
Heather laughs and shakes her head at herself. When we
meet, she is wearing an apron splattered with paint and classical
music plays softly in the background. Her Christchurch studio
is filled with early afternoon light, bouncing off the resin on her
artwork. Paintings are propped on walls, tables and easels and
wait, like expectant children, to be packed into the car. At the
time of publishing, they will be on display at the SCAPE Public
Art exhibition, In the Stillness.
Heather has led life at a swift pace. With her husband Neville,
she owns FreshChoice City Market and Barrington, working
together while juggling family life. All the while, however,
bubbling beneath the surface has been a stream of creative
energy waiting patiently to be released.
It was when the Browns were building a new home
in 2003 that inspiration struck. The white walls suddenly
beckoned to Heather, asking to be completed with works
of art that were of her own hand. So, she bought some
canvases and headed to her garage to respond.
“It [the garage] was a place where I got my joy, where
time became expanded, irrelevant,” she says. “It was restful
to my mind, but at the same time energising because I was
only thinking of one thing, instead of the life I would lead
outside of the garage.”
She still had the business to run, so the garage was
abandoned once the artwork were complete.
A chance meeting with renowned New Zealand artist
Max Gimblett saw her take up an invitation to spend time
with him in New York in 2012. Then, on a trip to France,
she had an opportunity to paint one-on-one with a French
American painter, Véronique Porter, in a small town called
Vence.
“We painted all day in her atelier [studio] and she would
invite her other artist friends to join us. They would come
and paint and then disappear and then someone else
would come and join us,” she says.
In 2015, Heather went to Tuscany, Italy and this time
sought out a painting class. In an old watermill building in a
village of Posara, she joined 10 other artists to study with
Sandra Iafrate.
With her creative fire thoroughly stoked, Heather
returned to New Zealand and she knew it was time to get
“cracking”. She purchased a building at 125 Aikmans Road,
Merivale, to use as a working studio and gallery, which she
would later call Studio 125 Gallery. While she waited for
the then occupier’s lease to run out, she found a space
three doors down to serve as her temporary studio.
“I would go there and paint all day, every day. I couldn’t
get the paint on the canvas quick enough,” she smiles.
When Heather was working on opening FreshChoice
City Market, she offered use of the building to SCAPE
Public Art. Heather is showing her series Psalm 46:10 there
alongside other artists for the In the Stillness exhibition. She
donates a portion of her sales to SCAPE.
Heather has a wonderful way of talking; gesticulating with
her elegant artist’s hands. But this shifts into another gear
when she talks about her series.
She rises from her chair and moves across the studio to
where her painting Shepherd’s Delight rests on an easel. The