Page 32 - Studio International - December 1968

left, Greg Curnoe detail from Twenty-eight daily notes 1967, painted
construction, 11 x 11 in., The Isaacs Gallery, Toronto below left,
Kenneth Lochhead Sky location 1967, acrylic on canvas, 136 x 81 in.
Coll : Mr Et Mrs da Roza

doxically that it was for Canadian reasons.
Vast open spaces had in fact been a theme of his figurative, sur-
realistically inclined painting of the 1950s. At twenty-four he had
been appointed head of the University Art School at the University
of Saskatchewan, and in 1952 was joined there by Arthur McKay,
and in 1958 by Ronald Bloore, closely followed by Kiyooka. From
this initial grouping of forces at Regina, the decision was taken to
invite certain American painters annually to Emma Lake in an
attempt to break down a frustratingly isolated position. Clement
Greenberg's encouragement was particularly influential in Loch-
head's own subsequent development, and Lochhead has remained
something of a 'Greenberg' painter. As distinct from the colour-
contrast painting more widely prevalent in Canada, Lochhead's con-
cern is for the experience of colour as an uninterrupted field, modified
or defined in scale by contrasting areas which are usually relatively
small, enclosed and confined to corners or edges of the main expanse.
Recently he has exploited the spatial drama of this expanse in en-
vironmental settings. A mural for York University outside Toronto
meets the challenge of the two converging architectural perspectives,
but in a set of vertical banners for Winnipeg's new cultural centre,
single colours are made to rise spectacularly past an intervening
mezzanine floor, so that the terminal incident and full effect of
contrast remain unrevealed until the spectator is at close range and
can look upwards. Colour becomes not only an experience of the field
itself, but an experience of one's distance from it.

Greg Curnoe
Painting is only one expression of Curnoe's absorbed and inquisitive
exploration of his environment. He is active in a dozen other fields at
once, including nihilist politics, pop music and writing, and is less
inclined to admit that any of his activity is to do with art than to
claim it as awareness of a total social commitment. Much of his
painting is a highly-flavoured pop art nearer the English variety than
the American, although it is liable to erupt into outspoken social or
political comment which is largely foreign to either (a large project
for a mural at Montreal Airport has run into trouble with the auth-
orities for alleged anti-Americanism). But his best work has a
narrower, or at least more localized, commitment. Curnoe's recent
and rapid rise to prominence on the Canadian scene has been as the
passionate exponent of a particular kind of regionalism — a regionalism
which is not sequestered from any of the concerns of the outside world,
but which, in accepting part as representative of the whole, is content
to work in and from a particular locality; in this case, Curnoe's home
town of London, Ontario. He regards it partly with the ironical
affection which reminds one of some of the English parallels. He fills
his studio with what is in effect the nostalgic bric-a-brac of small town
commerce, and uses it for collage objects. But he regards it also like
a kind of diarist, objectively recording both visual notations and his
own stream of consciousness in a series of what he calls 'lettered
landscapes', mostly executed with marking ink and rubber stamps
of a forty-year-old local type-face, and based on what he sees from
the studio window. One series, Twenty-four hourly notes, was
painted one an hour for twenty-four consecutive hours. Another
consisted of painted constructions made one a day for twenty-eight
days. They are intended to be read, not regarded as formal con-
structions like the lettering of Jasper Johns, but the ambiguity of their
stance between a beautifully articulated kind of field-painting and
straight reportage remains. The description itself has a Robbe-Grillet-
like factualness, visual rather than literary, and the double process
of reading and seeing, like certain types of concrete poetry, builds
up as an integrated experience of imaginatively rich complexity.