Page 31 - Studio International - January 1966

chequered composition. It could be a folded screen
with its forward leaf foreshortening towards the
spectator under an amorphous trailing shape
(ectoplasm, an unravelling bird ?). Of the five non-
purchase prizes of £100 three were won by invited
artists Robyn Denny, Terry Frost and John Hoyland,
all of whom are painters of design in firm structure
and balance. Derek Southall, another £100 winner,
who exhibited recently at the Rowan Gallery, London,
breaks the traditional convention of flatness for the
painting support and hung a canvas of softly coloured
stripes around a wire armature of vase-like contours.
Under 26 was the age limit for the junior section
prizes and here too one saw the evidence of the hard
edge abstract area paintings though with undertones
John Walker Tim Whitmore of forms less committed to symmetry—as in the first
Anguish Square Change prize winner Tim Whitmore's Square Change. Yet here
Open Section Purchase Prizes Junior Section (under 26 years old)
3rd Prize £500 First Prize £200 too the dominant areas of colour, red and green, are
set in equilibrium by interpenetration of the extended
chevron bar going off to the right and the cut-out
revelation of the red ground at the left.
All art, of course, is optical art and now more than
ever it is optical of a purity never striven for or achieved
before. 'No comment' is the war-cry and Barnett
Freedman is the cheer-leader. One of the side-effects,
discernible at Liverpool, is paradoxically a return to an
idea of beauty that has its own nostalgic Art Nouveau
flavour. British taste, despite a token hanging of
canvases here by Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud,
has never been gone on Brute Art or a more than literary
form of surrealism. On the evidence given at the 1965
John Moores Liverpool Exhibition, the seventh decade
of the twentieth century sees our younger wave of
experimental painters moving forward on a breaker of
romantic formalism. n

Left
Terry Frost
June, Red and Black 1965
Non-Purchase Prize
Right
Robyn Denny
Into Light
Non-Purchase Prize