Art
Every Day is Sunday
By SIMON HODGSON AT the Crane Kalman Gallery a young art teacher from Black- burn, Mr. Peter Shackleton, is exhibiting thirty-three oil paint- ings. They are all in that gaily coloured but rather mournful tradition which emerged in England in the nineteen-forties, and they are all in one way or another pains- takingly imitative. The tradition itself is not dis- agreeable, but it can be very dull—the sort of pictures Mr. Shackleton paints hang in every summer miscellany, or sometimes reach a more personal note in the work of, say, Mr. Alan Reynolds. Indeed Mr. Reynolds is a good example, as many echoes of his style appear at the Crane Kalman Gallery. He draws nicely; but he found early in his career certain formulae which he con- tinues to use in each succeeding canvas. For instance he uses a shape like a splayed shaving brush for the foliage of trees, cutting off the out- line in a continuous curving line. This Mr. Shackleton also uses, and one wonders if he will ever find another way to paint his trees. It would be a great pity if he didn't; both these painters are young, and both tend towards naturalism, and if you are going to be a naturalistic illustrator it is necessary to go on finding out new things about nature, and developing new means of paint- ing them. It took Corot—although a very different case—very many years to become the painter of an endless series of identically deadly willows.
All the young artists in this English tradition paint well—they enjoy their media—and are con- cerned with roughly similar aspects of English country; corners of villages, humble rooms and people, the unsmart ends of beaches. At their best they are in the tradition more of Sicken than of the early Sutherland, informing the most un- promising subject with life and sympathy. At their worst they achieve a painful sort of yokelish charm, their pictures barren of information or mood, trees, people, and houses sufficiently dis- torted to show that they belong to the world of Vaughan and other painters of the Forties, the formula plunked in without reference to the actual subject, leaving nothing for us to enjoy but patches of nice paint, and some gentle colour.
By no means all of this applies to Mr. Shackleton, but he must do more to convince us that he paints a tree because he has something specific that he personally wants to say in paint- ing it. In this way he would capture more of our attention, which he will not do by painting one or two loutishly whimsical moorland centaurs to cheer his show up—as he has in his present exhibi- tion. The real fault with these artists is that they are not brave enough, or ambitious or vulgar enough. Illustration in,one form or another is the next week. intention of every painter, otherwise he'd write, or do landscape gardening, or make pots instead, and illustration, even for the most fragile and delicate talents, needs determination and arra- j gance, or at least a considerable degree of inde- pendence. Above all, pictures, be they abstract or drawings for the Illustrated London News, must communicate directly; surrealism failed because it only became illustration—i.e., its intentions could only be visually recognised—after the viewer had read a few dozen explanatory pam- phlets. It is not enough for Mr. Shackleton and others to take a few formulx, dispose them more or less pleasantly on the canvas, paint and colour them in a professional way, and then say that they've painted a landscape. They are like Sun- day painters who once went to a good art school and now do pictures as very pleasant Christmas presents for their families and friends; and they're better Sunday painters than most because pro- fessional methods have been taught them in handling their materials, and they have kept up with a few full-time artists from whom they have learnt some surface tricks that are still in fashion. Their work lacks urgency and alertness.
One bad-tempered footnote; a letter from the Crane Kalman Gallery reached me, advertising this exhibition, saying that Mr. Shackleton lives, with his wife and baby, 'a clean, decent,„purpose- ful life.' After some more about poor Mr. Shackleton (who, one hopes, never saw the letter before it was sent out) being free from complexes, and being sincere 4nd unaffected, it finishes by hoping that 'you will visit the exhibition.' Does , that encourage you to plunge past Harrods to the Gallery?
By the time this appears there will remain only two days in which to see Mr. Bryan Wynter's abstract paintings at the Waddington Galleries.
These are rather monotonous in pattern, being mostly on a plan of strong vertical lines, but they are vigorously painted, and some are remarkable for their colour. Mr. Wynter is a painter who. in his Cornish fastness, develops and slowly and determinedly grows in strength and assurance. bought my first picture, an angry bunch of thistles on a Cornish window-sill, a lithograph by Mr. Wynter, when he was doing very different work (and when he was exhibiting at the other end of Cork Street—gallery politics?), and I should very much like to own.one of the large oils he is now showing.
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