About Pauline

Pauline Morse was born in Christchurch where she lived for 9 years before moving to Dunedin for 3 years. Another move took the family to Wellington where she attended Wellington Girls’ College and then completed a BSc at Victoria University. Her interest in natural history prompted her to apply for a position in the New Zealand Wildlife Service where she worked for nearly 10 years. Pauline is a self-taught artist and she has enjoyed painting nearly all her life. As a 12 year old she won a nation-wide art competition with her depiction of Otago Harbour.

While on a visit to Fiji in the early 1980s, she visited the Fiji Museum where she met Fergus Clunie. He explained that he was writing a book on the birds of Fiji but had no-one to illustrate it. “Something made me open my mouth and volunteer to do it although I had not painted birds before”. Colleagues in the Wildlife Service were very helpful criticising early efforts and with the aid of bird skins from the Dominion Museum (as it was known as at the time) for reference, Birds of the Fiji Bush was completed.

She then began painting New Zealand birds, produced cards for Forest and Bird and painted a series of black robin studies which were reproduced as prints. One, a print of the famous Old Blue, is still used by Forest and Bird as an award for conservation efforts. Her bird paintings caught the attention of New Zealand Post and Pauline was invited to produce designs for a number of stamp issues including the 1980s definitives featuring birds and butterflies. Another issue featured tuatara for the World Wildlife Fund. About the same time she was also asked to produce 3 issues of “duck stamps” for NZ Fish and Game. In 1992, she was awarded the title of “NZ Wildlife Artist of the Year” for her study of brown teal. The Bank of NZ commissioned her to paint a series of kiwi studies for their cheque books.

In 1994, Pauline was invited by Halcyon Press to produce a book, Wild Natives, featuring her paintings and including the original artwork for her stamps. Her watercolour paintings of birds and other fauna are exquisitely detailed. Each painting is completed with very fine brushes and takes many hours of work. The detail is, in part, a reflection of her scientific background but is also the result of a lifetime interest in objects collected from nature. She has also produced many cards and prints of her work. Early in the 2000s, she turned her attention to the convoluted hills and harbours around Porirua and changed from watercolour to oils. A poem by James K Baxter, Tangi, was inspirational in its description of the land as having had it’s limbs bared by the stripping of the forest which clothed it. Pauline has titled three of her recent exhibitions “Whenua” as the meaning of the word encompasses a feeling of connectedness to the land. Whenua means both land and placenta in Māori and recognises the nurturing role of the land and our dependence on it and its resources. In turn we must care for the land if we wish for it to sustain us. The landscape paintings show the bare limbs and bodies of the hills and also the small pockets of remaining forest cover, often protected in gullies.

Pauline has also taken up printmaking and along with her partner, John Anderson, produces a series of small copperplate etchings depicting New Zealand’s flora and fauna.

She lives in Pukerua Bay in a house surrounded by trees and overlooking the ocean and Kāpiti Island.