ART Tindle's Progress
LeAcH year the British art critics' prize goes to a youngish artist with a reasonable body of work awaiting the fuller recognition it de- serves. Paolozzi was one early, far-sighted choice. In 1962 it was David Tindle, though the Arts Council, CAS and John Moores had already favoured him. Wider recognition, however, is still due to this exploring painter of thirty-three, whose latest exhibition at the Piccadilly Gallery contends with the smarter recipes of Patrick Procktor at the,Redfern opposite.
Like Procktor, David Tindle is a 'painterly' figurative artist with a more subtle quality of line and handling of fluid colour. He first attracted attention with his massive seas pound- ing against Arbroath. With growing freedom he came to combine a stormy handling of earthy and whitish pigment with a coherent sense of luminous space and structure of his London scenes. Paddington canal, groves of filigree- cranes of silvery tonality, moving traffic and figures reflected in shop windows—these Tindle translated with his peculiar feeling for the ex- pectant vacancies and blurred, fluctuating move- ments of the metropolis. In art, as Braque said, the only valid thing is that which cannot be explained. The elusive shadow-play of Tindle's windowscapes posed the question 'what next7' It led, in fact, to his last series of morbidly in- trospective apparitions, even more evanescent, desperately seeking release from their boxcd-in frames. He seemed to be tying himself in emo- tional knots.
A recent move to Suffolk has resulted in painting generally more vigorous, substantial and easily read. One is reminded at times of Diebenkorn's strange tonal relationships of broad planes of colour, and both moody artists (who admire each other) have learned from Matisse. Among Tindle's figure studies is a girl brooding over a handrail, swept in with light flexible shapes in a design of sharp-angled silhouettes peculiarly his own. East Anglia in- spires an expansiveness. In Tindle's incoming tide which swirls down to one's feet, the liquid dappled hues give a fresh purpose to abstract expressionism. But it is the expectant mystery of some interior, or vacant arena at Alexandra Palace which works most subtly on the imagina- tion. Many drawings precede these biggish can- vases. But for highly subjective artists, like Tindle and Michael Andrews, the act of painting remains a continuous struggle with chance, in- volving frequent transformations of the surface. What emerges at last rewards a visit to Cork Street.
NEVILE WALLIS
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