Kaleidoscope - Frances Hodgkins

Television (Full Length) – 1989

New Zealanders like me can't help becoming denationalised. They have no country, it's sad, but true. One carries about an exaggerated sense of not quite doing the right thing leaving your home and family.
– Frances Hodgkins on the angst of being an expat, in a letter home to her family

Although of an older generation, Hodgkins was accepted because of the vitality of her work, and her sharp, critical mind. Many a critic described her as young and up and coming, much to her amusement.
– Narrator Ray Henwood, on Frances Hodgkins' place in the British avant-garde at age 60

Painting reduces me to tears and misery: peaks of ecstasy, depths of disillusion...
– Frances Hodgkins

Few women can do it successfully. It requires enormous vitality. That's my definition of genius: vitality! One is fighting mental inertia all the time. One's family overseas awaits results, not knowing or realising the fierce obstacles and difficulties. How can they?
– Frances Hodgkins in a letter home to family, on the struggle of being a female artist