Pauline Adele Thompson was a New Zealand painter.
17 Facts About Pauline Thompson
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Pauline Thompson exhibited with the Auckland Society of Arts and in the New Women Artists exhibition at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in 1984.
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Pauline Thompson died on Auckland's North Shore on 27 July 2012.
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Pauline Adele Thompson was born on the 28 November 1942 in Auckland, New Zealand.
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Pauline Thompson's father, Walter Kirkpatrick Thompson, was a builder, and her mother, Marie Gabrielle Buffett, was a piano teacher.
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Pauline Thompson was born with haemolytic disease of the newborn, and her life was saved with a full blood transfusion immediately after birth.
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From 1956 to 1960, Pauline Thompson took a commercial course at Seddon Memorial Technical College and art classes at Auckland City Art Gallery.
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Pauline Thompson studied full-time at Elam in 1963 and 1964, where she was tutored by Colin McCahon and Garth Tapper.
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Pauline Thompson left Elam without finishing her degree out of protest after McCahon told her that she would never be a true artist because motherhood would distract her.
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Pauline Thompson kept her last name after marrying fellow artist Ross William Ritchie in 1965.
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Also in the 1960s, Pauline Thompson produced a series drawing inspiration from pop art and Piet Mondrian.
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The mutiny of the Bounty - a historical event Pauline Thompson had ancestral connection to - and the subsequent lives of the mutineers and accompanying Tahitians heavily inspired Pauline Thompson's later works.
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Pauline Thompson produced large paintings and made use of iconography and spiritual symbols.
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Pauline Thompson struggled with being a woman in the male-dominated world of art for all of her life.
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Pauline Thompson was concerned that New Zealand women artists were neglected by art history, and so deliberately put details about her life into exhibition catalogues and interviews to ensure her experience as a woman artist in New Zealand was recorded.
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Pauline Thompson noted that critics often discussed her work in relation to her domestic life, which they didn't do for her male peers.
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Pauline Thompson created a series of painting based on her ancestor, Mauatua, and other Pitcairn Islanders.