Outside the system
Andrew Lambirth on three artists who decided not to sell their work the conventional way
Our society is so structured nowadays that artists are expected to conform to a career trajectory which (with luck) begins with childish aptitude, extends through the degree system of art education and continues on to dealer-managed exhibitions in chic showrooms to the west or east of the metropolis. Few really successful artists flout this template, with its culmination in museum shows and the international promotion of a readily identifiable product. Outside this comfortable and largely selfserving system there have always been what you might call journeyman artists who have made an unofficial living, often meeting prospective clients in pubs, taking on commissions to paint signboards or portraits, or even the odd mural. Some will have attended art school while others will bear impatiently what has come to be seen as the stigma of having no formal training. Some of these journeymen will be true artists — with something to communicate that can be done only through a visual medium — others will be various
sorts of craftsman. It is with three real artists who happen to operate largely outside the accepted system that I am concerned here.
Allin Braund (born 1915) had a distinguished career as both artist and teacher before his retirement in 1976. As he says, since then he has been painting 'more or less in secret'. He settled back in his native Devon and somehow ceased to maintain any contact with the London galleries which had once shown and sold his work. And this is a distinguished artist whose lithographs were hung in the British Pavilion at the Venice Bienn ale of 1954, in such exalted company as Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi and Graham Sutherland. As a teacher at Hornsey College of Art in the 1960s he was an 'inspiration' to such students as Ken Kiff (1935-2001) and Allen Jones (born 1937), and it was actually through researching their work that I first came across Braund's name.
Jones describes Braund's work as 'Braque out of doors', the images composed with receding planes parallel to the picture plane in a post-Cubist idiom. Braund himself defines his point of view as 'dissect and assemble', though his paintings in acrylics and oils since 1976 have encapsulated a less formalised response to the West Country landscape, and tend to concentrate on fixing a moment of the changing sky. Now a retrospective of paintings and some prints is planned in the local purpose-built Burton Art Gallery and Museum at Bideford (2-30 November). The earliest work will be a crayon drawing of a robin done when Braund was five, and since he is still painting the show will span more than 60 years of more or less continuous achievement. Braund is delighted at the prospect of being re-discovered. After all, what is the point of continuing to paint if no one sees the work? In a recent letter he wrote: 'As Georges Braque would likely say, "Unseen paintings do not exist"' Elspeth Hamilton is an architect, painter and teacher who divides her time between London and Cornwall. She describes her painting — which is mostly
of elemental landscapes, favouring dramatic rock formations and the swirl of the sea — as 'an entirely passionate affair with the material world'. The variety of her activities and her readiness to accept a challenging commission have enabled her to survive. She has worked in stained glass as well as in oils and mixed media, executing commissions for hotels, offices, cafés and private houses. She has painted 'portraits' of specific places (Scottish cliffs have been a recent project), and even portraits of people. She has herself arranged exhibitions of her landscapes and sold them successfully, but she remains outside the closed-shop of the dealer system, and thus stands little chance of either being written about by art critics or being taken more seriously as an artist.
This is unfair, as her work is not only powerful but rather like one of the forces of nature she loves to paint. (This is a woman who thinks nothing of descending a sheer rockface on a rope to reach a usually inaccessible beach she wants to paint.) 'Awe,' she writes, 'is the glue that gives coherence to the creative spirit.' She aims to understand a particular place at the deepest level — historically, geologically, psychically — and speaks of 'working through a piece of work until it comes to rest in its vitality'. It's the preservation of that vitality which makes her painting so potent, and is the reason why it should be altogether better known.
If Elspeth Hamilton has endured very little formal art training, the situation of my third artist is the reverse. Philip Hardaker (born 1954) studied first at Harrogate College of Art, then specialised in sculpture at North Staffordshire Polytechnic before taking a Masters degree in Fine Art and Ceramics at the Royal College of Art in London. Since 1985 he has lived in a 17th-century packhorse inn on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent, working as a sculptor mainly in the public sector, and undertaking lots of educational work and artist-in-residences in schools. Hardaker is an accumulator, a sifter of detritus, collecting the flotsam and jetsam of our wasteful consumerist society and transforming it into art. He represents his work as 'archaeological sculptural painting made from clay and found objects'. For 25 years he has been digging up ancient and modern ceramic shards from industrial tips. He employs fragments of Wedgwood and Doulton ware, or Minton tiles, along with his own cast ceramic details of heads, animals or Stealth bombers, in ceramic collages of considerable intricacy and beauty.
Hardaker's work is political in the widest sense in that it enables him to voice deeply felt concerns for ecology and for social and political injustices. The fact that he recycles materials is essential to his beliefs, and it is more than fitting that he comes from a family of three generations of scrap dealers. Ile is admirably idealistic and once made a relief map of Britain out of flattened Coke cans, mostly picked up whilst hillwalking. It is called 'Green, Pleasant and Military Land', and was a comment on American airbases in England and the 1988 bombing of Libya. His ceramic collage 'Digging for Our Future' is about the Greenpeace protest against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific and is poignantly framed with children's spades. Among various community projects are a vividly decorative sculptural throne for St Peter's church in Stoke and various mosaics for schools and a hospital. He has survived by diversifying and makes very good ceramic jewellery, for men and women, resplendent with extraordinary glazes and gold and platinum lustres. Hardaker, whose compelling, intelligent and humorous work has made something of a name for him locally, deserves to be known to a wider audience. Consult his website for more information: www.philhardakerco.uk
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