Page 50 - Studio International - May 1966

which was framed between two white pillars—the pillars into being through a long process of metamorphosis—
belonged to the holiday villa which he rented in Spain Heath talks of 'a progressive discarding of literal and con-
eight months ago. 'But it took me a long time to find that ventional meaning in favour of a new and unexpected
out,' he says. 'At first, I couldn't remember where it image that has to be found.' It's a way of painting which
came from. You'll see the same shape in other pictures.' obviously involves risks—at any moment the whole pro-
This kind of remark offers a hint as to the way in which cess may go wrong. Heath's studio is full of unfinished and
Heath's pictures are made, and the method strikes me as discarded canvases.
being an exceptionally interesting one. Though he is, as This method of working fascinates me for several rea-
I've said, a romantic painter, the creative rhythm is slow. sons. One of them is this—that it calls into question our
Unlike many modern abstract artists, Heath is a prolific usual definition of 'spontaneity'. The adjective 'spon-
draughtsman, and his preliminary drawings are, as often taneous' generally carries a complimentary overtone
as not, figurative—rapid sketches of the nude, notations when applied to painting. I've certainly used it in that
of landscape. These drawings (which he has never, I way in my first paragraph. And there, what I was really
think, exhibited) would perhaps strike the casual ob- saying, I suppose, was that the paintings seemed to arouse
server as being already more 'abstract' than the artist `spontaneous' feelings in myself, and that I found this
himself seems to think. The eye puzzles over a tangle of pleasurable. But the adjective could, I think, be read in
lines and forms, which suddenly resolves itself into the another way— to imply that the pictures were the dazzling
torso of a woman. What is deceptive is the way the draw- embodiments of momentary impulses. And this is some-
ing is placed on the sheet, and the unexpected points of thing which Heath's paintings quite clearly are not.
emphasis which the artist has found. Already, in these How does this kind of painting compare with what it so
very early sketches, the forms have an entirely personal nearly resembles on occasion— the work of the Abstract
feel to them—the same feeling which will afterwards re- Impressionists ? I think I can answer this question more
appear in the non-representational finished canvas. satisfactorily by replying to it obliquely. Jasper Johns,
After the preliminary drawing has been made, the idea who is in one way the heir of the Abstract Impressionists,
goes through many stages, and the process is perhaps less and in another the leader of a counter-revolution, once
deliberately planned than it might seem from my descrip- made some paintings and lithographs concerned with the
tion here. Basically, what Heath does is to draw from his idea of numbers (numerals) being printed or painted one
own drawings, and these further studies are often worked on top of the other. The notion was that the final result
over in pastel and water-colour. That is, the picture comes embodied all the previous images in the series. This, but
less theoretically, is what Heath is trying to do. His
paintings have a real density of meaning because so many
meanings have gone into them. But the meanings are
still things spontaneously generated in the artist's mind.
The intrusion of Johns and his use of numerals into this
commentary reminds me of another pleasurable en-
counter in recent weeks—with the young German typo-
grapher Hansjorg Mayer, who has been in England
lecturing at the Royal College of Art, at Corsham, and
elsewhere. Mayer is a publisher as well as a typographer,
and his Futura series of broadsheets are among the most
interesting things of their sort that I know. Philosophi-
cally, he stands at the opposite pole from Adrian Heath.
His concerns have their roots in the work of the pioneer
constructivists.
Mayer has said of his work: 'I believe that it is necessary
to get away from personal taste and style, the constructed
letter based on the line and the circle is my material. All
my compositions are constructed in the concrete way—
all material is used functionally. ... This kind of concrete
typography relates to concrete poetry on its visual side,
in the same way that sound poems, devoid of semantic
values, relate to the phonetic side.'
The sudden liberation of the letters of the alphabet (it
amounts to no less) brought about by concrete poetry and
by related experiments, is something which I find fas-
cinating. The reason is, I think, something to do with
giving the work of art itself a new freedom of action. It's
often pointed out that writers are at a disadvantage, com-
pared to painters, because of the boundaries imposed by
language—a writer cannot have his full impact in trans-
lation. What is sometimes forgotten is the fact that most
paintings are the prisoners, not of a system of grammar,