Austen Deans
After the war, he studied painting at the Sir John Cass Technical Institute in England before settling down on a lifestyle block in Canterbury.
[1] His father, Alister, was a scion of the Deans family, notable in Christchurch for being one of the earliest European settlers in the region, and was later killed at the Battle of Passchendaele.
[3] Austen Deans' early years were spent on the family farm near Malvern before, when he was 10, his mother moved to the Riccarton suburb in Christchurch.
[5] The outbreak of the Second World War disrupted Deans' plans to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.
[8] The British Government anticipated an invasion of Greece by the Germans and decided to send troops to support the Greeks, who were already engaged against the Italians in Albania.
[9] The campaign was little more than a series of withdrawals but Deans still found time to make depictions of life in the Greek villages he saw.
Deans had been interviewed by the commander of 2NZEF, Major General Bernard Freyberg, the previous year but the position would eventually go to Peter McIntyre.
In the meantime, Deans was badly wounded; he had inadvertently set off a land mine and had to be hospitalised with his legs full of shrapnel.
[14] Flown to Athens by his captors, Deans received medical treatment for several months at a hospital at Kokkinia, near Piraeus.
[15] While there, he was provided with pad and pencil by a fellow prisoner of war (POW) who wanted a portrait sketch to send to his family.
Paid a few pennies a time, he soon built up enough cash to organise, through a friendly Greek hospital worker, the purchase of painting supplies.
While recuperating at Kokkinia, he met Australian modernist artists Justin O'Brien and Jesse Martin, both of whom were also POWs and who would influence Deans with their styles.
[20] Deans himself had the opportunity to get away from his captors but refrained from doing so; while on a work party outside of the camp, he slipped away from his guards but realised he was too attached to his painting portfolio back at Stalag XX-A to leave them behind.
Nominally, the POWs were selected for the camp based on their good behaviour but Deans soon discovered that its actual purpose encourage the prisoners to enlist in the British Free Corps.
A couple of his paintings from his time in Genshagen were given to another POW; these were sold to an art gallery in Christchurch in 1987 and are notable for their modernist traits.
Once this was complete, he departed England aboard the SS Mooltan on 2 December 1945, arriving back in New Zealand by the end of the year.
[26] In early 1948, the couple's first son was born and later that year the family went to England, Deans having accepted a scholarship to study at the Sir John Cass Technical Institute in Aldgate.
[27] He benefited from a higher standard of teaching than he had received to date; his tutors at the institute included Bernard Rice and Nicholas Egon, the latter being known for abstract art and landscapes.
[35] Despite his age, in his later years Deans made several painting expeditions to the Southern Alps, including an ascent of Aoraki/Mount Cook in 1974,[36] as well as a trip to Antarctica in late 1981, sponsored by the New Zealand Government.
[44] Over the course of his painting career, Deans was a prolific producer of landscapes, often from the Canterbury region which meant his work was particularly popular amongst Cantabrians.
[45] The work he produced as a POW was particularly well received by art critics[38] although they have not aged well; many were completed with paints of poor quality or on acid cardboard and have deteriorated.
