Page 55 - Studio International - October1968

00impressive painters. In the Vancouver Art Gallery is a collection of of Rauschenberg and close student of Duchamp, looks intellectually
over seventy paintings by the West Coast loner, Emily Carr, whose towards New York, and he worked for some years in London. To
movingly expressionistic hymn to the pine-forests was, at the very English eyes, in fact, his work has a certain English quality, if only
least, something which had to be painted by someone in that because one recognizes areas of preoccupation within it—Dada,
scenically overwhelming region. She, too, tends to be currently communications media, visual semantics—closely parallel to the pre-
occupations of artists in England as various as Paolozzi, Kitaj,
Richard Hamilton, Harold Cohen. Morris, of all the younger
generation of Canadian painters, is perhaps the least concerned with
the 'problem' of being Canadian. He is temperamentally a citizen of
the world, or at least of the 'mid-Atlantic culture', to whom the
availability of contemporary art has disposed of any need actually
to live in a metropolitan centre. In some of his most recent painting
he seems to draw equal confidence from what one might call Ameri-
can and British attitudes—the extreme, blazoned visual statement of
the one, and the more ambiguous, intellectualized visual argument
of the other, characterized by, for example, a format of vertical
stripes complicated by optical illusionism.
I don't want to suggest any neat pattern of complementaries among
Vancouver artists, but the contrasts and affinities of attitude between
Morris and Baxter can be followed out further in those between
Claude Breeze and Brian Fisher—painters who have nothing in
common except sympathy for each other's aims: Vancouver has no
factions. The work of both, again, gives the impression that it would
be easily at home in London, although Breeze's paintings have no
truck whatever with contemporary international styles. He is an
uninhibited expressionist, with the expressionist's tendency to emo-
tional excess, which leads him into stridency and occasional crudeness
when he tries to over-reach the power already inherent in his
inflammatory images of contemporary violence, taken from photo-
graphs and the television screen. But he is technically much con-
cerned with the visual transmission of such images (he has taken to
framing them like television sets, which the image then bursts out of
and overflows), and here the subject-matter is often controlled by a
surprising and extremely sensitive delicacy of colour and traditional
painterly 'touch'. Figurative painting of this kind inevitably prompts
certain comparisons with Bacon or Hockney, though Breeze shares
neither the contained tragic sense of the first nor the coolness of the
second. But his work stands out with an unmistakable, personal
urgency. What would be almost impossible to deduce from it is that
Breeze shares with Baxter and with Fisher a formative inspiration in
the teaching of Roy Kiyooka at Regina. Kiyooka himself now works
in Montreal, but Regina is remembered as one of the seminal
`episodes' in recent Canadian art-history. It clarified problems of
provincial isolation and gave a sense of contemporary direction of
regarded, quite wrongly, as an embarrassing legacy. Baxter's which the present Vancouver scene is the immediate beneficiary.
romantic streak is therefore looked on as his weakness, whereas it Brian Fisher, who was also strongly influenced at Regina by the
may turn out to be his strength. Among his inflated plastic bags and purist, formalized abstraction of Ronald Bloore, is one of those West
vacuum-pressed panels are plastic mountains and clouds; plastic Coast painters whose work seems to look across to the far side of the
seascapes with real water and toy boats; plastic trees and sunsets. Pacific in its refined, calligraphic expression and withdrawn, con-
He has compiled a photographic analysis of Vancouver as a series templative serenity (that his abstract painting has evolved from
of piles (from the Rockies to rubbish dumps), which for loving intricate drawings of organic life suggests parallels with Tobey or
evocation of the spirit of place is the urban descendant of Emily Morris Graves). But it also has some affinities with optical painting,
Carr's forests. in the muted colour vibrations, spatial illusions and after-images of
The difference, of course, is that it is not heart-on-sleeve. But moire patterning that emerge from superimposed layers of close
I have discussed Baxter at some length because his work exemplifies linear progression. Fisher is still a tentative, rather conventional
some of the problems of sophistication which crop up in contem- colourist, but in black and white his meticulous distinction of style
porary Canadian art—an urban, intellectual awareness which some- achieves effects of considerable, aristocratic power.
times seems merely skin-deep, if only because urban attitudes, The Vancouver scene is intimate, intense and of very recent de-
American-inspired, are often a generation younger than urban velopment. But that it can produce four painters of this quality is
attitudes in America itself. In Vancouver, a more confident cosmo- impressive, not least in the range of contemporary awareness that
politan is Michael Morris, although a link between Morris and they represent.
Baxter would seem to be the example of Andy Warhol— an artist far In my next article I hope to enlarge on those broader aspects of
better understood and more profoundly admired in Canada than in current Canadian painting, of which Vancouver provides a con-
Britain. Baxter's affiliations follow certain West Coast patterns, to the densed version, as they manifest themselves particularly in the larger
extent of his having travelled and worked in Japan. Morris, a friend and longer-established centres of Toronto and Montreal.
157