Page 45 - Studio International - November 1966

aesthetic sophistication somehow emerged direct out
of apparently unsophisticated procedures. Part of his
magic, of course, was that he appeared to be an
aesthetic illiterate. Elizabeth Allen is not in the least
illiterate in any sense. She is a cripple and a recluse;
and she has lacked all conscious contact with the
world of art. Her genius is therefore innate. Yet, para-
doxically, as I wrote in her catalogue introduction, one
can only begin to describe her rag-mosaic pictures, to
someone who has not seen them, by referring to an
amazingly varied number of art forms, with all of which
her own art has, at one point or another, overlapping
characteristics. I mention both Persian and Indian
Moghul miniatures, Matisses like The Painters Family
of 1911, with the two boys playing chess in front of the
fireplace, Ben Nicholson's Tuscany drawings; Etrus-
can frescos and certain folk art embroideries of Eastern
Europe; the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Paul Klee;
a Picasso Balcony-Window of 1924 and twelfth-century
English art, both sculptural—fonts and capitals—and
pictorial—the painted ceiling of the nave at Ely; the
mediaeval Book of Hours. Writing in The Guardian,
Norbert Lynton found that 'these comparisons do not
seem far fetched', and proceeded to add Siennese
painting and Max Ernst to the list. If the subjects of her
pictures fall broadly into two categories, sacred and
profane as it were, the pictorial language she has been
gradually perfecting has been moving, irrespective of
the subjects, in a consistent direction: from the linear
to the planal. What I mean by this is that whereas in
earlier works she draws (with stitched lines of various
textures) images on a common ground, in her most
recent works she has evolved an amazingly precise
language of spatial colour: inter-locking segments of
the design are strongly varied in colour and textures,
their recession of space is fantastically controlled.
Patrick Heron

James Lloyd James Lloyd as Rousseau 1966 determination, often applying himself to his
Gouache 21 x 14 in.
Courtesy Portal Gallery minutely worked pieces for twelve hours a day.
As with many naive painters Lloyd's circumstances
are rather more interesting than his work, for the
appeal of the bright story-book pictures, though
real, is limited and the appeal seems to be
diminishing as his technical accomplishment grows.
The subjects are for the most part taken from
Lloyd's immediate surroundings: his family, land-
scapes, villages and farmyard scenes. His choice
of them reveals a banality and sentimentality but his
pictures are saved by the imperfections in style.
The aim is demonstrably photographic realism and
his style is unremittingly intricate, detailed, and
complex. But the eye for detail is sharper than the
feeling for essentials and the completed pictures
have a strangeness and eccentricity of form which,
combined with the shallowness of depth (at variance
with the photographic intention) lends in many
cases a heightened sense of reality to the subject so
that their very clarity combined with their infelicities
comes close to the surreal.
Frank Whitford