Patrick Heron CBE
Patrick Heron is one of the most respected contemporary British abstract painters.
A supporter of American Abstract Expressionism in the '50s. Heron did much to encourage a serious look at painting in the United States and it was partly through his writing that a greater acceptance of the New York School came about.
In this film, shot entirely on location in the artist's home and studios in Zennor, St Ives, Cornwall. Heron describes his working methods, his work on fabrics, the interaction of the Cornish Landscape and his work, his absorbing interest in colour, his writing and his friendships with other well known artists.
50mins, Colour VHS
Ian Hamilton
Finlay
Away in his high moorland home and garden, the poet, sculptor and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay has become a myth in his own time. In spite of a growing international reputation both as a poet and an artist he still remains a mystery to most of his fellow Scotsmen and is little seen or understood by them. Around his croft he has created his own world, the world of his art.
This film gives for the first time both an intimate and authoritative portrait of this fascinating and important artist. It was shot entirely at his own home and in his superb garden filled with examples of his work. He describes his respect for what he calls "The Western Tradition in Art " : his relationship to the contemporary avant garde: his belief that art is becoming increasingly secularised and his attitude to the notion of force in art and his particular love of warship imagery. He describes current attitudes to warship imagery as being equivalent to Victorian attitudes to the nude and the film concludes with a discussion of his activity as a gardener and his ideas about the concepts of realities of nature and time. 30 mins
Terry Frost started painting in a German prisoner of War camp in the second world war, later he became Professor of Painting at Reading University and well known for his stimulating teaching. He has links with many of the artists of St.Ives and working with them in the late 1950's he was encouraged to develop his own natural adventurousness in his painting. He now lives in Newlyn, a busy fishing port on the South Western tip of Cornwall.
Linked by fascinating pictorial sequences Terry Frost describes his introduction to painting, his time as an art student in Camberwell, South London: his main concerns with colour, shape and particular kinds of imagery and his project to illustrate the poems of Frederico Garcia Lorca
Patrick
Hughes
Hughes paintings are sparing in detail almost to the point of being schematic. At one glance one might find them slick. We are given the minimal signs of the components of his designs: residual floorboards and four or five lines suggest the space of a room, landscape is reduced to paint-box green and blue areas of earth and air. His almost diagrammatic technique, which acts as a distancing device, lends itself to the medium of print . His work scales down and reproduces well, it is immediately recognisable and has a popular following.
That romantic symbol, the rainbow, as an inflexible band of bright colours has become Hughes' trademark. Yet a hard edged rainbow is in itself a paradox, implicit in the simplicity of the statement, is philosophical thought. Hughes' rainbow, hung out on the line to dry, thrown in a dustbin or propped up against a landscape raises questions about the nature of reality and illusion, the qualities of colour space and substance. It points to the metaphysical void of an existence robbed of the lyrical and the poetic.
In this film Patrick Hughes talks of his background, of his relationship to the writers and artists who have influenced him and he discusses his interest in comedy and the significance in his work of paradox and pun. The film includes sequences of Hughes printmaking at the Coriander studios in London.
