FIVE YOUNG PAINTERS

Press, Volume C, Issue 29671, 15 November 1961, Page 17

FIVE YOUNG PAINTERS

Exhibition At Durham St,

Pam Cotton, Julian Royds, John Gillespie, Tony Fomison, and Murray Grimsdale, who are holding an interesting exhibition at the Durham street art gallery, are all young Christchurch painters whose work is familiar in local exhibitions, with the exception of Mr Grimsdale, the youngest of them.

Miss Cotton and Mr Fomison may be categorised loosely as expressionists: they are more concerned primarily with the expression of feeling than with the creation of form. Miss Cotton’s work is highly charged with emotional turbulence and a sense of mystery, chiefly through her free and expressive brushwork. At times, she seems to draw on some of the darker recesses of the subconscious for her expression, but more disturbing are frequent compositional weaknesses, notably in the upper comers of her paintings. Nevertheless, she is a painter of more than average gifts. Like her, Mr Fomison works almost exclusively from the human figure, though the mood of his paintings is more suggestive of landscape. His paintings are big and bold, but they do not always hold the attention very long because of their simplicity. Some of them are rather like enlargements of his little pen drawings. However, at his best (“Naked Woman” and “Mulgan’s ‘Man Alone’”) there is sufficient detail to interact with the thrusting power of the main rhythms.

Miss Royds still seems to be in a rut, manipulating stereotyped symbols for superficial decorative effect. But there are signs in some of her abstracts that she is beginning to engage in original plastic thought again. Mr Gillespie’S paintings are based on decorative treatment of architectural fantasies, and they all suffer in some degree from a lack of relationship between the central theme and the background. In some cases the conceptual gap between the two areas is so wide that they could belong to different paintings. Much of Mr Grimsdale's work is based on the classic forms of modern paintings, such as the cubi-t still life. He has scarcely begun to evolve his own artistic personality, but he has a keen sense of colour and be composes his paintings with ease and skill —J.N.K.