Provenance:

Fletcher Challenge Limited label affixed verso

CSA Gallery label affixed verso

Doris Lusk was born in Dunedin, the youngest daughter of an architect, Thomas Younger Lusk. Drawing and painting were major interests during her childhood spent in a rural area bordering the Waikato River just outside Hamilton.

With the advent of the Great Depression the family returned to Dunedin. Doris Lusk attended Otago Girls' High School and enrolled herself in the art school of King Edward Technical College in order to pursue her ambition of becoming a painter. Here she met Anne Hamblett ( later to marry Colin McCahon ) and was taught by Charlton Edgar and R.N. Field. Another influence was painter Russell Clark at that time employed as a commercial artist by the printing and publishing firm, John McIndoe. Lusk attended his life drawing classes and was an active participant in the lively art scene which grew up around this romantic figure.

At the time Otago Art Society conservatism was a force to be reckoned with. Lusk removed her work in protest from an Art Society show whose selectors had rejected one of Colin McCahon's large Otago Peninsula landscapes ostensibly because it was inadequately framed.

Eventually a group of these younger artists and their supporters packed the Society's Annual General meeting, voted out the old council and put in a more open minded one. Lusk's life long devotion to landscape painting was developed through the teaching of Charlton Edgar. Her early Central Otago landscapes in high keyed colour show his influence. Doris Lusk spent three years as a commercial artist and taught art at a number of girls' schools. In 1941, as Mrs Doris Holland, she moved to Christchurch eventually becoming the mother of a boy and two girls.

In 1943 Lusk joined the progressive Canterbury painters - The Group - exhibiting in their Ballantyne's show for that year and many times thereafter. Summer holidays at Duvauchelle, Banks Peninsula led to many paintings of that area; others included the State Hydro series at Waikaremoana; from the mid 1960s the artist began a long series of paintings at Onekaka, Nelson with its black fractured wharf cutting into the surf. In 1947 Doris Lusk became a tutor in pottery and later in painting; in 1967 she was appointed lecturer at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts.