Art
Painstaking
John McEwen
Alan Johnston is currently showing six pencil drawings at Nigel Greenwood (till 11 November) under the inclusive title 'River Plain'. From a distance, and in photographs, Johnston's drawings are distinguishable as little more than hazy grey shapes — sometimes club-like, more often rectangular, always vertical — commanding the middleground of white panels of paper. They are framed as individual 'pictures' and spaced, in accordance with their collective title, as an overall composition, both with regard to each other and the room itself: the intervals of the hanging relate to the common, though variously employed, measure of the drawings themselves. And a similar attention to detail, though by contrast of a totally unmechanical kind, becomes more and more apparent the closer you look. What is amorphous at a few feet turns into a myriad of marks at a few inches, as busily various, as subject to channels and shoals as the course of a river indeed, though analagous, rather than representative, of the physical experience of flowing water. Each drawing is completed, as their energy suggests, with out interruption, the sessions sometimes lasting as long as twelve hours. Johnston is a Scot and this methodology of growth consciously places his work in the organic tradition of Celtic art — it is no surprise to find that he is also a keen Joycean. But kulchur is not art, and the work must stand on its own merits. This it does. Its drawing is both novel and exquisitely delicate, exhibiting that unfailing characteristic of true art, and infinite capacity for taking pains. The paper is especially hard and shows no indentation, and the pencil, a German Staedder 3mm, one of the few leads so far invented that could sustain this kind of wear. Normal brand pencils would have been consumed by these drawings a box at a time, and been in the process a quite impracticable source of interruption. Concentration is absolutely essential to the work. It enables the artist's hand to trace the emotional pattern of his thought.
Clive Barker, who has been off the scene for some time, is reintroduced by his erstwhile dealer Robert Fraser at Felicity Samuel (till 1 December, with a fairly sensational series of contorted bronze (and chrome) masks and busts of Francis Bacon, who inevitably steals the show with a fine tryptich of Clive Barker. Bacon is reported to have said that Barker's sculptures reminded him of his face first thing in the morning, and certainly the most crumpled are the most successful. The best, in which Bacon's forehead forms a cardinal's hat above his folded features, creates an effortless synthesis of the man and his work. It is probably the best piece Barker has done and, aside from the self-portraits, probably the best portrait of Bacon. None of the other pieces achieve this synthesis so elegantly, and some miss the mark altogether, even as likenesses.
Anthony Green is one of the few bright lights of the Royal Academy, a painter whose pictures can be appreciated both by connoisseurs and passers-by. It is very suitable, therefore, that he should currently be honoured with a retrospective at Burlington House (till 12 November) — an honour indeed since he is only thirty-nine — but disappointing that he should have been palmed off with the inaccessible Diploma Galleries. What an opportunity has been missed. Green, the current favourite of the Summer Exhibition, upstairs; Moynihan, that never-has-been, down. Green's test pictures got better and better: his art historical references and knowing contrivance matched by a growing relish for life (usually in the form of his magnificent wife) and descriptive detail. Best when all the stops are out, at once knowledgeable, professional, erotic, observant, funny, tender but rarely, his great virtue, slushy or gushy, he is the drinking -man's Hockney.
Dick Lee is a teacher at Camberwell School of Art who has amused himself and his colleagues over the years by drawing their attention to particular events, usually art exhibitions, through pinning up specially designed notices. These take the form of Picassoesque assemblages of, mostly, random bits of flotsam and jetsam he has salvaged from the Thames at Barnes, designed to parody the work and caricature the artists involved. Inevitably it is a bit of an in-game, because you have to know what and who is being alluded to. At Camden some attempt has been made to lower this threshold by hanging a work of the artist depicted alongside the relevant notice, but it only emphasises that the caricatures are the meat of it. Some of these are as inventively contrived as they are well observed. If you know Tony Fry or Terry Frost or Bill Coldstream of Frank Auerbach, to mention onlY a few, it is a must. Dick Lee's show runs consecutively with two others at the Centre: oils and impastos which together, and all too convincingly, described 'The Dream World of Anne Sinclair': and the sculpture of Gerry Judah and Richard Layzell, which brings the present series of sculpture shows in the garden to a conclusion.
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