Page 48 - Studio International - November 1971

ingredient: freshness. I don't mean that these amounts to a process of research as each Painting is a firmly-rooted, cathartic activity
pictures were all dashed off. Many of them show category of mark or gesture, each of the limited which renews itself in each generation, and it
overpainting as ideas succeed each other. The ingredients of pure painting, is set into new may well continue to give varied sensuous and
freshness of Hilton's pictures is in the eye and the situations. No doubt he has a lot of failures; if imaginative pleasure indefinitely. For good
spirit, not in the wrist. He stops when his idea so they were not in the show. Picture after reasons, however, a large proportion of the
is sufficiently there on the canvas; no need to picture offered a new visual and emotional present-day art that seems likely most strongly
nail it down or underline it. encounter, which means it was necessary to to define our period is either three-dimensional
So the keynote is difference. It is disengage positively from one before turning to or little concerned with the special reality of the
disconcerting, especially in a period when another. Hilton's lyricism does not flow from carefully supported and painted surface. It is
everyone claims individuality and asserts it by work to work, and the pictures don't seem to increasingly through direct use of the ordinary
repeating himself or modestly rearranging his comment on each other. Each is driven home systems of life (from photo-mechanical
image lest his public lose touch. Hilton is 6o. and left to its own devices, sufficient and vibrant, reproduction to weather and landscape) that art
He paints as though he alone had use of canvas unpropped by theory or process. q now engages the spectator's attention. At the
and pigments and as though he had started NORBERT LYNTON present moment more than ever, the activity of
yesterday. I don't want to go to the extreme of painting marks on a surface, though valid and
saying that no one could have recognized some 4 Roger Hilton unrestricted, has to have and reveal a deeply felt
of these pictures as being his. What I am Untitled 1968 motivation if it is to be more than shape-
saying is that they are held together only by Mixed media 8 x so in. juggling indulgence or a skilful, suggestive
personality, not at all by style or habit. 5 Roger Hilton mélange of images extracted from previous
Stooping Woman
In theory this is against my own grain. In a Charcoal 8 x so in. contexts—if, in short, it is to have a telling
sense, Hilton paints irresponsibly. There seems 6 Roger Hilton reality as the concrete embodiment of activity
to be no direction, no development therefore, Untitled and idea. Some present-day painting achieves
ultimately no end or intention to be realized. Charcoal 8 x so in. this; Tom Phillips's work is unusual in doing so
In practice his apparent headlongness —in itself 7 Roger Hilton while eschewing ambiguous perceptual effects,
Birds
a marvellous show of agility and inventiveness- Charcoal 8 x so in. modular abstraction, or loose physical
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