A voyage of discovery

A few weeks ago I went to see the Dali and Film exhibition at Tate Modern with my friend Paul Trathen and, while at Bankside, found a copy of the exhibition catalogue for a South Bank Touring Exhibition from 1990 on the work of Patrick Hayman.

Philip Vann writes in the catalogue that Hayman "was a visionary artist, who worked mostly on a small, intimate scale, an instinctive grace and quizzical humour masking his quite devastating insights." He was "a man marked by vulnerability and suffering, but also by spiritual sweetness and humour."

In his 'A Painter's Notes', also included in the catalogue, Hayman writes that the artist is a creator "perhaps like Jacob who needed a ladder to see more." Painting, he writes, has "a quality of praise, of affirmation." "Any painting which is affirmative and comes from a heightened consciousness," he suggests, "may rightly be considered religious" but "one cannot look directly at the sun" and so an oblique approach is necessary. Irony and ambiguity, even perhaps humour, play their part in this approach and "to expose directly by name or suggestion the connection with miraculous events is to ask for trouble." To paint, he says, is to start on a voyage of discovery: "... one may forsee the end as with a sunrise or sunset. The light, waxing and waning, colour's one's thoughts. Those thoughts may permit the artist to see much or restrict him to seeing little, and if he tires of seeing too much of himself on the canvas it is possible to push beyond further into the unknown. There waiting to be discovered lie lands beyond one's usual experience of time and of matter. When that happens the voyage may possibly be said to have begun."

Born in London to Jewish parents who had emigrated from New Zealand, Hayman's formative experiences were both in New Zealand and Cornwall. His friendships with artists such as Colin McCahon, Jankel Adler, Lionel Miskin and Peter Lanyon, among others, fed his work at different stages. Public recognition in Britain was slow in coming but towards the end of his life he saw due recognition while, in Canada, his work stirred deep chords among collectors and academics. He commented that it had been a "strange Odyssey from NZ to London to St Ives to London to Canada: there seems an inner logic in it all - perhaps ... the search for a new world ..."