Native Peculiars
What Hayman can do most beautifully is to invest a tender and penetrating study of a waif- like girl with the remote solemnity of an icon. His art is often discomforting as imaginative fables may be. But it is always painterly, and something abruptly unexpected about his sharp, wry images excludes any mawkishness. The puce, grass green, and floating whites which recur in his emotive colour schemes are as individual as the jutting forms of his mythology of hatchet- faced kings and wraiths and lone stubby boats. In his more successful larger work, The Entry into Jerusalem, the stiffly stylised incident and heraldic emblems are organised in a com- partmented design which is also compatible with a consistent sense of space and atmospheric tone.
Before the contemporary actualities of a goal- keeper or motor-bike, Hayman's vision falters. It finds natural fulfilment in symbolism with which to explore and illuminate human dreams and aspirations, as conveyed in ritual and Arthurian legend. In a day of outsize gesticula- tion I find it heartening to attend for once to a small, but articulate voice. Heartening also to recognise in Patrick Hayman's miniaturist art a persistent strain in native painting as fanatical, self-obsessed as was Blake's, and a spirit remote and immune from the scramble in the market- place.
Elisabeth Prink was born in Suffolk in 1930, fifteen years after Hayman. The very English and inbred character of her aggressive sculpture has been, in this case, of greatest assistance to recognition abroad. She came in on that tri- umphant wave of British sculpture ten years ago which seized the imagination of post-war Europe with its creatures of fear and menace. Frink's forms have since become more chunky and weighty with the peculiar gravity of bronze. The hysterical tone of her brittle images of beak and claw has passed. But her new bronzes at the Waddington Galleries belong still to her uneasy brood of conspirators and birdman, scarred warrior and predatory winged beast. With those of Chadwick and Meadows, her meta- phors mostly spring from that period when an overstrained expressionism seemed to embody the prevailing Angst.
The hunched and slabby forms of Frink's creatures, poised nervously on long thin legs with a sense of stretched tendons and taut muscle, are altogether more expressive than the armour- plated bulk of Meadows's warriors on plain stumps. Nevertheless, her impulse evidently needs the renewal which the expectant, transi- tional air of this collection seems to promise. Already her craggy heads of horses enduring from some antique world have a sculptural tension, lacking in her earlier lumpish fossils. But I believe the directness and toughness of wood carving could best revitalise Frink's imagery and modify some tortuous mannerisms. Chopping and hewing are strongly implied, as it is, in the abrupt superstructure of such figures as her joined assassins. There is every good reason why this symbolic humanist should say goodbye to the foundry, and give a fresh lead in a material which many abstract sculptors have successfully appropriated.
One such, and most fashionable, is the American Louise Nevelson, whose painted wood assemblages have been much discussed. in her Hanover Gallery exhibition closing today. I would advise the newcomer to these fantastic boxed constructions, each compartment filled with carved or ready-made furniture bits, that they played far more on the imagination in their white, gold, and black succession at last year's Venice Biennale. Hers is a black magic demand- ing the right environment and sudden surprising confrontation. The impact at the Hanover is lessened by diffusion. But one is held still by Nevelson's alliance of arcane surrealist mystery with formal order, and the creepiness of her up-ended coffins is not soon forgotten.
NEVILE WALLIS
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