YOUNG SCULPTOR FROM N.Z. LIVED ON PANCAKE DIET

Northern Advocate, 5 January 1938, Page 10

YOUNG SCULPTOR FROM N.Z. LIVED ON PANCAKE DIET

Can an artist keep wife, child, selfrespect and love of his art on 29/- a week? asks Louise Morgan in the “News Chronicle.”

Hamish Macpherson, 22-year-old sculptor, can. But Hamish and his wife are courageous people. A lively, happy, fine-looking pair, they live on the L.C.C. scholarship of £75 a year, won recently by Hamish.

When I reached their two-room flat near Blackheath, .they were celebrating the sale of two of Hamish’s works with a “scrag end” stew and a packet of cigarettes.

The works were a hawk and a pair of pelicans exhibited at a show .which opened in London this week. Carved with dozens of other animals from a ton of building stone bought for 10/-, the hawk fetched £2B and the pelicans £l4. Hamish creates beauty from old pieces of pitch pine found in garages, and bits of ebony driftwood. He draws on kitchen paper at 40 sheets for 6d. Pie makes his tools by reforging discarded files.

The family budget is simple: 17/- for rent, 6/- for the baby, and 6/- for Hamish and his wife.

‘’But we manage, as the poem have to,” they said, adding, “Cabbage is ghod and' cheap.”

Luxury on a Cobra.

What has kept them cheerful, and bought them fruit and clothes for a year, was the sale of a pitch pine cobra. He had offered it in vain for 5/-. At a show last winter it brought £25.

Their meeting four years ago they believe was fated.

Daughter of a South Wales miner, the future Mrs Macpherson had just come to London to enter domestic work. Boni in Hartlepool, Mr Macpherson had also come to London, after a boyhood in Now Zealand, to try for an art scholarship. They met at a social club, and that evening decided to pool their resources for the sake of his work.

“He was living entirely on pancakes of flour and water,” she told me, “and had tasted no food but pancakes for eight weeks. He had had to burn some of his w r onderful carvings to cook them.”

After her day’s work at a flat in Oxford Mansions, she would rush off to cook dinner for Hamish and do his washing and cleaning. Last year they decided they “couldn’t wait forever,” so they married. Now there is a bonny baby Hamish of three months. Home and Beauty. By. the kitchen entrance stands an exquisite life-size stone torso, near the stove a glorious carving of a horse in oak, and among the bits of secondhand and home-made furniture are figures tnat one day may be collectors’ pieces a deer, a madonna, the gigantic and strangely moving head of a prophet. a swooping bird, a portrait head. They are beautiful, aren't they,” said little Mrs Macpherson, eyes shining with pride in her husband. At last they are turning the corner she feels.