Page 50 - Studio International - February 1972

Four exhibitions Untitled 1971
Colin Hitchmough
in the Midlands 9 x 36 ft (variable)
Acrylic on canvas
2 David Prentice
Anthony Everitt Dunnington
7o x 98 in.
Oil on canvas plus aluminium
The artist who lives and works in the provinces
is in much the same position as a man watching
television. He receives information but cannot
transmit it. News of the art world reaches him
through magazines, newspapers and exhibitions,
but his own work is seldom publicized. If the
four Midland shows (or events) noticed here
had taken place in London, they would not
have come and gone without leaving a trace.
Colin Hitchmough's show at Ikon Gallery,
Birmingham, raised some provincial hackles.
The exhibits consisted of unstretched
assemblages of canvas stained with dull, over-all
colours. One 36-foot-long black hanging (`Is it a
dust sheet ?') took up an entire wall. At first
sight, it looked like an expensive anti-art
gesture. But although an element of irony was
probably intended, Hitchmough is an academic
painter with academic painterly concerns.
This is borne out by the manner in which the
picture was executed. Hitchmough works in a
small studio and he decided to use a surface
that was too large to lay out all at once. He took
a bale of canvas, unrolled a section, painted it an
over-all black, unrolled another section, painted
it and so on. Because fabrics are folded over
before they are baled, the result was a two-tiered be read as a sequence of colour intervals (with join is echoed by a piece of stretched blue string
grid outlined by slivers of unpainted canvas space/time implications). However, the fields on which bisects each of the canvases.
where different areas of pigment joined. which they were deployed were usually divided The string is, of course, an addition and in
An analogy with fresco painting suggests into three and their all-at-once symmetry was Hitchmough's latest work it is rightly
itself. Small areas of fresh plaster have to be in tension with the linear progression of the subtracted. Following the example of Grand
painted section by section before they dry. One stripes. Central, joins or divisions are invariably the
of the remarkable features of Michelangelo's But there were various problems to which he products either of the method of painting or of
decorations in the Sistine Chapel is not the did not find completely satisfactory solutions. the nature of the materials used. Control over
manifest composition (rational and pre- How could he guarantee, for example, the pigment is further reduced and benign accidents
determined), but the accidental sub-composition integrity of the field ? (Symmetry and colour (seepage, bleeding, pools collecting on irregular
where different areas of fresco, indicated by rhymes were partial, arbitrary answers). And paint surfaces, flaws, etc.) are welcomed.
slight tonal shifts and visible joins, describe the how could he relate the figures to the edge of the But the dialectical consequences of
painter's arduous journey across the ceiling. It field without being decorative or tricky ? Hitchmough's creative standpoint have not yet
is, so to speak, this sub-composition that Gradually Hitchmough abandoned the polarities exhausted themselves and there are still
Hitchmough is after. of figure and field and turned his attention to contradictions to be resolved. At the Ikon show,
His hanging is an elegantly simple invention. the picture plane itself. He became interested tasteful and often associative khakis, reddish
Space is articulated without recourse to in joins, divisions and meeting points, whether browns and blues confused the purity of the
formalism. Composition and colour have an inside a single canvas or among a number of artist's intentions. Some of the paintings were
all-over neutrality and derive, not from an canvases. slit vertically and the flaps pinned up to reveal
aesthetic decision imposed by the artist, but At the same time he explored means of the undersides; this was an ingenious method of
from the necessities of production. Because the loosening the tight control he had previously creating figures without adding anything to the
canvas can be hung loosely and informally, it exerted over colour and form. When he was field, but the manner in which it was exploited
generates a 'real life' presence and looks working on Grand Central he noticed that a harked back to the tripartite divisions and
refreshingly ill at ease in the specialized reaches single coat of paint on a flawed canvas registered intervals of the past.
of gallery space. two tonally distinct areas. He decided to repaint Hitchmough does not need to retain these
Colin Hitchmough was born in Lancashire each area separately, letting the pigment bleed devices, when he is capable of producing the
in 1943. He studied at the Liverpool College of at the joins. In this way, 'figure' was abolished black hanging—the most striking achievement of
Art and then as a post-graduate student at the and form came from the nature of the 'field' and the exhibition. This variable, informal extent is a
Birmingham College of Art. He has always been was not superimposed. self-sufficient statement that does not rely on
sensitive, sometimes to the point of Friendly Skies of United is a series of pictures formal crutches or personable colour.
derivativeness, to the 'world' of painting and as a painted over a nine months period in 1970. In David Prentice is a Midlands painter of a
student he attached himself to the figure/field the final version, two blue canvases (with strong somewhat older generation. Born in 1936, he
tradition. His early canvases consisted of vertical literary references to the azure skies of an airline studied at the Birmingham College of Art and
stripes set against a plain ground, which could advertisement) are fastened together. The central has spent most of his working life teaching there.

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