Hanly haunted by the fire

Press, 13 June 1984, Page 20

Hanly haunted by the fire

By

GARRY ARTHUR

Twenty-five years ago, in London, Patrick Hanly started a series of paintings on the theme of fire. The fire in question was the one that still threatens us all — the nuclear holocaust. He had become caught up in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and went on the famous Aldermaston marches, although, as he now says in his selfmocking way, he marched only from the Albert Hall to Trafalgar Square. Still deeply committed to the nuclear protest movement, and very active in the Auckland Harbour peace squadron, he has recently been painting some of the old fire series subjects again as “transpositions” of the early works. “I’m going over the series,” he said, “and rerendering them in, shall I say, my, ahem, maturity, or veteran period. It’s very exciting for me.” Three of those transpositions are in the exhibition of Mr Hanly’s work which opened this week at the Brooke/Gifford Gallery, together with several prints derived from the fire paintings. The difference, after 25

years, is mainly stylistic, he believes. “I’ve come back to the theme, but my painting is more fluid, and not so influenced by other painters. It’s much more racy, technically speaking. “I get across the message, in pictorial terms, of a pretty horrifying subject, but I treat it as humanistically as possible, in order not to be depressed.” One of those paintings, “Nuclear Innocent” shows a family “with nowhere to go but accept the bloody disaster.” It is a completely new work, but the others are straight transpositions using the same symbolic language, boats which signify the hope of escape from the nuclear deluge, islands which are refuges of hope too, trees representing regeneration. “In those days I was very influenced by Chagall,” he confesses. “Now my work is more robust.” The bird of freedom, and the hearts and eyes of love which recur in Mr Hanly’s work reappear jn his new fire series too. “It’s romantic stuff,” he concedes unashamedly. “You can’t go around being blue about it.” Although others see this kind of work as having Eolitical content in the roadest sense, Patrick

Hanly is somewhat surprised at that. He says it was not intended. “It’s not a title I accept easily,” he says. “I hope I’m too shrewd for politics.” His one deliberate political statement, cancelling out his “Golden Age” picture with an angry scribble at the time of the Springbok rugby tour, he describes as “a oncer.”

“I try not to get into the illustrative area where it’s too obvious,” he says. He has completed six paintings in the transposed fire series, plus two or three prints in small editions, with more to come. “I’m excited about reworking this old theme with this new maturity,” he says.

But he will not consider what might come next, if anything at all. “Dare we look any further ahead, quite frankly?” he asks. “The U.K. and Europe have got seven or eight minutes left on the nuclear clock, and that’s scary for people who can get their minds around those facts. They just knock you flat in the street.”

But as the symbols of hope attest in his paintings, he is not completely depressed and pessimistic about the future.

“It almost verges on being a divine joke,” he suggests, without laughing. “No, I’m not pessimistic, but I think I ought to be. It’s like a Western — they’re facing up for a shoot-out and can’t back down.”

While the world may see Patrick Hanly as one of the top three or four painters in New Zealand, he regards himself now as one of “the old First Fifteen." “I’m out of date in the energy thing,” he says. “As far as deals are concerned, there’s a big emphasis on young talent, and I’m glad they’ve arrived to take over.”

Even so, he finds it hard — almost impossible — to name the new vanguard of New Zealand painters. “They show in alternative places,” he explains. “They’re hard to find, but I go. Some of them are terrible, but one or two are just marvellous.” Patrick Hanly’s paintings cost several thousand dollars, but his prints can be had for about $l5O. “Graphics is an area that I enjoy,” he says. “It makes your work more available to people. It’s a democratic medium. I don’t do big editions, usually 50 or less. It’s a change away from

big-time painting in the studio.”

He works in screenprint etching and dry-point, often combining several techniques, and adding some he has invented. Then he will “enrich” the prints with brushed or dribbled paint, developing them as he goes along, so that no two prints in an edition are the same. He says gleefully that this infuriates the graphics purists.

The Brooke/Gifford exhibition is not Mr Hanly’s typical series presentation, but a mixture of work without a single strong theme. The paintings are mainly figurative, and include some from the “Innocence” series and the “Vacation” series.

Symbols of wonder, joy and love are the stuff of his “Innocence” series, and are concepts that he believes in strongly. “They’re old-fashioned things,” he says. “There’s nothing mainstream about them, or about me. I had to say them, and I believe they’ve got to come back eventually.”

The contrast could not be stronger between Mr Hanly’s warm symbolism and the trend he sees arriving in New Zealand from the United States — alterna-

tive hard-edge street art that is “wild and almost violent.”

Before the emphasis on his old-fashioned values returns, he believes New Zealand painting will have to work through that movement first. (“If we get away with the nuclear thing,” he adds, cautiously.) Patrick Hanly feels that he has now passed the peak of his activity. “I don’t do as much I did between say 35 and 45 when I had this tremendous energy push and was really cracking a lot of stuff. Now I’ve slowed down; I’m more contemplative.”

But he does not discount the possibility of a sudden new burst of activity. “I don’t do many paintings now,” he says, “not a hell of a lot. But it might all come at once.” '

Maturity has bred confidence, he says. “Now I can go along without fear or apprehension — not stumbling and struggling.” His motto these days is “When in doubt, don’t,” and he will spend long periods of time just waiting in his studio for the muse, “If your head is in the right shape, the work will come,” he says, “but it takes time.”