Craftsmanship and Common People

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 419, 4 July 1947, Page 16

Craftsmanship and Common People

To the Editor,-IR,-It is in keeping with the existent confusion over questions of aesthetics that in reports on the visiting exhibition of rural handcrafts from Great Britain the press has attributed to the simple English, Scottish, and Irish craftsmen such complete command of the art of functional design, and such profound artistic judgment and ingenuity as I am sure could only be accounted for by a practice of some form of black magic. In The Listener we read that "the curves and proportions of every article are such that they must have been designed by artisans who were also artists." Then further along The Listener’s review goes on to say that "the whole exhibition indicates that the artistic faculty is not found only in a few select persons. The makers of these implements are ordinary men and women whose art is as spontaneous and natural as the craftsmanship with which they serve the community." Statements like these ‘about work of this nature are "misleading, to say the least. Besides giving the false impression that the craftsmen responsible for making these very excellent things are also the originators of the form of the articles, they completely ignore the whole most important lengthy process of evolution from the often crude be-ginning-idea through to perfection by gradual improvement extended over "many generations of practical use that is the basis and. the strength of all traditional designs. With a little thought it becomes obvious that it is precisely this long process of tefinement-this long apprentice-ship-that accounts for the perfection of traditional forms, and that in the majority of cases even the. most skilled rural craftsman is following patterns that have been gradually evolved and improved as they have been handed down from one generation to another. These forms are right, not because they have been designed by particularly clever people, but because they have achieved functional perfection. And it is because they are right in this way that they are good to look at. It is no disparagement to the craftsmanship of these men and women to point out that they are not necessarily. the original designers of the things they make. To follow sympathetically the’ traditional form a craftsman needs to be an artist of specially developed sensitivity. Traditional, forms are not rigid, and even when they have reached a high degree of perfection they still permit of personal and local variations. The personal touch of individual craftsmen and various regional characteristics can always be seén in work of a similar nature from separate districts. And the people doing this type of work can hardly be classed as the ordinary run of English, Scottish, and Irish people. Here writers have followed without due reflection Massingham’s preface to the exhibition catalogue. The artistic faculty might, as Massingham states, be "in widest commonalty spread," but it is not, unfortunately, as widely cultivated. The craftsman has :

developed certain of his artistic faculties to a high degree; and also it must be taken into account that he probably had a’ pronotinced bent or inherited talent in the first place for the particular craft he has mastered. These craftsmen are specialists, nothing less, The local insurance agent cannot be expected to make competently a functionally beautiful scythe, weave a graceful % basket or a good and handsome piece % of cloth, or model a special shoe for a ~~~ horse. Neither can we expect such skill from the average barmaid, clergyman, storekeeper, farm. hand or retired stockbroker. 33 The truth is that the handcraftsmen form a minor and quite distinct section of rural society. Apart from their special, . skill; their pride in and love of their, work and the integrity of their approach. gives them an outlook vastly different from the average run of people to-day. j Inevitably their numbers have decreased with the spread of cheaper mass production methods of making the things of every-day use. This is regrettable, but the really lamentable part is that the spirit they represent has in the main been’ completely~lost by the ‘highly mechanised manufacturers who are taking the handcraftsmen’s place in modern society. In the days when everything had to be made by hand most men must have taken pleasure as well as a pride in their handiwork and it is the fact that this is far from the case in many of the mass production factories of today that has a lot to do with the shoddiness that is everywhere around us,

ERIC LEE

JOHNSON

(Auckland).