TWO YOUNG MEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 947, 4 October 1957, Page 5

TWO YOUNG MEN

HE question whether we do or do not export our best brains, and whether we can afford to go on doing it, was very much in my mind during that fuss over Alan Ingham’s sculpture for the Takapuna Library. Reading rather sombrely and gloomily that other fuss about New Zealand’s continued loss of nuclear scientists, I reflected that they at least are likely to hit the headlines more persistently than mere poets, painters, sculptors or writers. For when it’s a question of scientific research which ends in more efficient destruction we see (as in Britain during the last war) that- money for such a cause blooms miraculously just where, "They" told us, there was none available. So, probably, we shall manage to raise the hoot for the necessary nuclear brains (though I’m told that it’§ not brains so much as safe Yes-men that the authorities are after), while continuing to lose a great many people with artistic gifts and artistic in"tegrity. However, as Oliver Edwards said, cheerfulness is always breaking in: and I was cheered last week at the opening of Keith Patterson’s one-man show at the Society of Arts new rooms in Eden Crescent. For here is a young New Zealand painter who. went away for ‘six years, and has now come _ back, we hope, to settle in his own country: and here is the harvest of his years in Spain and Majorca to be seen in his native Auckland. Most of the 40 paintings were done, he told me, in the last few months of

his stay abroad. ihis interested me, because it contrasted sharply with a writer’s method. Many writers find they write best from notes on the spot, redhot with the excitement of new people, new countries, néw ideas. But many a painter has ‘to wait patiently until ,acclimatisation has set in, and sometimes longer still. For one thing, he almost always has to get used to the light of a new country (though Majorca, apparently, with its sea-lighted skies, is very much like the Waitemata in this respect), before he even begins to absorb its new colours. Then, and only then, can he paint, Now I do have to take myself by the scruff of the neck and make myself

look at modern painting; and this show was no exception. Criticism is quite beyond me, for I don’t know, and never shall know, enough about painting generally to presume so far. (Not that this sober thought ever restrains the multitude, when roused by a vividly new artist: witness the flood of comment in Auckland from all and sundry over the Henry Moore exhibition.) All I am going to say is that it was refreshing, after five and a half years away from Europe, to stroll once again round wellappointed rooms hung with paintings entirely new to me, and feel once again ' the excitement which a sheer explosion of personality produces, whether in paint, print, marble, or any other material. No receptive person, however ignorant, could doubt that here, in Keith Patterson’s work, is a most individual touch, Many of the paintings I did not like, one or two even made me bristle with dislike: but three, at least, I would have bought on the spot if suddenly blessed with cash-and not a single one bored me. If this can happen every now and then in Auckland, I for one can do without any further Ifve stimulus from Old Europe. But the only way to ensure its happening is to encourage those

who make it happen. We, the public, surely owe something to men who risk a good deal to go overseas, and then return bringing their sheaves with them. We owe them at least the courtesy of a careful hearing, if they are writers, and an equally thoughtful look, if they practise the visual arts. Incidentally, it has always struck me as a trifle odd that we tend to make more fuss over the artist who goes overseas on a Government bursary or some such thing, while being less generous to those who have done the trip under their own steam. Is it because there is a’ condescending streak in even the best of us, and we feel flattered at having had a hand in the first kind of adventure, while being affronted that we have had none in the second? Anyhow, here is a New Zealander home again: here are his paintings. What shall we do about it? Go and see them, of course, if we can: don’t despair of seeing them, if we live in another centre. What, for instance, is happening among the artists of Dunedin? Could they not. send us something, in exchange for this Patterson show, which would be as new to them? Is it not, in any case, worth trying? ce * % HE dreadfully sudden death of Guy Young, at the age of 37, must have shocked a great many people in Auckland and elsewhere. He was a very gentle, sensitive and humorous person whose host of friends all over New Zealand, in Mexico, the States, and Canada will miss him sorely. Like many men who have been dogged by wretched health for most of their lives, he was

an incomparable observer, watching with compassion, and a great deal of quiet fun, the oddities, vagaries, and rare beauties of the humans he met in a wandering life, I met him first on the other side of a microphone, in Christchurch, where we did a couple of broadcasts together with that menacing little hexagon between us.’Doing a radio talk with someone you have never laid eyes on before can be something of a trial: and this was fuller of hazards than most, For he had had one of his bad asthmatic nights, and was ‘not sure whether his voice would stay the course. I was therefore harassed throughout by the fear that if the worst happened I should have to carry on, with the knowledge that it. was Guy Young on D. H. Lewrence, and not Sarah Campion putting questions, that the listeners wanted. However, with skilful husbandry, his vocal cords held; and the result was as usual when Guy_broadcast; there was the modest though unmistakably emphatic, impact of a personality. Though he was an easy broadcaster, in the sense that he enjoyed doing it, and it certainly seemed to come most naturally to him, I doubt whether he was an easy writer. He was too much of a perfectionist, and he knew his time was short. And, like all writers, I think he longed to leave behind him something more permanent than journalism. This was a feeling Katherine Mansfield knew all too well for comfort: both of them could have echoed Marvell: But at my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. And yonder all before us" lie Deserts of vast eternity, He might have lived longer if he had been less generous with his gifts. But his own way was bést: he will be remembered as a man who lived

ardently.

Sarah

Campion