Helen Brown 
Helen Brown lived all her life within a mile radius of where she was born. Educated at Diocesan School for Girls, Auckland, Brown became a Junior Designer for the Banks Box Company, of which her father was a Director. She worked there all her life and eventually became Senior Graphic Designer. By then she was considered to be the top commercial designer/artist in Auckland. Helen Brown did not marry and lived at home with her mother. Attending night classes at Elam for 8 years, Brown was strongly influenced by Archie Fisher and John Weeks, after initial life classes with Lois White, her contemporaries being Jan Nigro, Alison Pickmere and Joan Lillicrap. In 1938 Helen Brown sold her first painting and in the early 1960s, she had her first solo show at John Leech Gallery, then in Shortland Street. Her work was often done in series and, although in the 1940s several figurative studies were to be seen, these later disappeared from her work altogether. She went on painting trips to Te Whaiti, a sawmilling place in the Ureweras, and she favoured bush subjects although this later changed as Helen spent more and more time in Auckland and the Waitemata Harbour became a major feature of her work. She began looking at the sea, harbour and islands of the Gulf and as time went by the landscapes which dominated the composition became stylised floating islands on a pale pearly sea. The effect of light on water is what Brown strived to achieve in the last 10 years or so. Endlessly, at all times of the day, and in all lights, that was her major theme. Athough Helen Brown is not forgotten by her contemporaries, she is little known by today's public. In the late 1940s her works were reproduced in the Arts Year Books and she enjoyed several complimentary critiques in Art New Zealand. She is represented in the collections of the Auckland City Art Gallery and the National Gallery as well as several international collections.
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