"THEY WON'T GET IT ON A PLATTER"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 323, 31 August 1945, Page 11

"THEY WON'T GET IT ON A PLATTER"

WO talks on painting in 1YA’s Winter Course Series "The Arts To-day" are being given (Thursday, August 30, and Thursday, September 6), by A. J. C. Fisher (whose photograph appears aboye), Director of the Elam School of Art, Auckland, since 1924, when he arrived from England from the Royal College of Art and the Slade School. When The Listener called to see him the week of VJ, Mr. Fisher had not put his talks down on paper, but he had a clear idea of their scope. In the first talk he would speak about the early days of painting before the printing press was invented, before methods of quick reproduction were discovered, before the days of easy transportation and before the era of the camera. This was the age, he said, when a painter’s job was to tell stories pictorially to people; his painting was objective visual painting, not imaginative or emotional painting and the stress was on the subject matter, the sfory (Or, in the case of portraiture, the likeness) rather than on the aesthetic form.

In his second talk Mr. Fisher pro: posed to describe how the advent of the printing press, the camera and the cinema, even the ease of transporting works of art from one town or one country to another had thrown the artist out of his job of telling stories to the people. Painting became subjective personal art with the emphasis on the side of the personal emotion and feeling of the artist himself; communication and illustration, forthe benefit of the public, were of secondary importance. "It becomes merely a happy coincidence if the artist finds another human being thrilled in his way at the same thing," Mr. Fisher said. "You hear a lot of talk about presenting culture to the masses, introducing good paintings to the millions, explaining which pictures are good and which are bad and so on, but you never hear anyone suggest that the millions have got to get down and Jearn about it," Mr. Fisher complained. "You can go to Eden Park and everyone in the grandstands, women as well as men, knows every step of the game, rules and all. But painting -that’s something different! They think anyone can go into a gallery and say that’s good, this is bad, with no training whatever. Well, it won’t do. They'll have to get down and do some work, learn the rudiments. If they want culture they won’t get it handed to them on a platter, they’ll have to work for it."