Hugh Mackinnon - A Retrospective
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Fallen Rider 1952 Oil on canvas 24.75 x 29.5 (63 x 75cm)

HUGH MACKINNON (continued)
© Nicholas Usherwood
February 2006 

How these ideas began to work in practice can be seen in his finest early painting "Portrait of the Artist as High Flyer", illustrated on page 14 and at 6' x 8' the largest painting he has ever made. The series of radical changes it went through before final completion indicated in part by the painting (ill. p15) of the subject at an earlier stage in its life. Essentially while the underlying dramatic geometry of the composition, the great arcing curves of the circus ring, seating, lighting, canvas and supporting poles, the pools of light and dark, always remained largely unchanged, the various groups of riders and horses inhabiting it came and went with startling speed until he finally settled on just the floating balloon, the ladder and climbing acrobat and a distant group of figures on horses as the points of visual focus. Yet, at the same time they are never just pictorial devices but become instead crucial elements that, in turn, underline the sense of the great swaying, billowing mass of the tent to poignant and disturbing effect to create a mood that, in turn, echoes something of the character of the film that was very much on his mind when he was painting it, Marcel Carnés's celebrated tribute to the mime theatre of C19th France, Les Enfants du Paradis.

Left: Portrait of Jacob c1950 Oil on board 15 x 20.75 (38 x 53cm) Right: Portrait of Blake c1960 Oil on board 24 x 20 (61 x 51cm)
Private Collection

It is essentially the same procedure by which he continues to work today, over half a century on, the starting point now more usually a photograph, one of his own or one he has come across in a book or newspaper, and lighted upon because the oddity or particularity of its composition would seem to accord with his current preoccupations and researches into pictorial dynamics - the interrelationship of space, light and colour in the creation of a pictorial object. In this he readily agrees with Matisse when he observed "an artist only has one idea", the need being, in his own words, "to diversify that limitation by choosing lots of different subjects."

More immediately, returning to the narrative of his life, the need to earn more money through painting became increasingly urgent and though his second show at Gimpels in 1953, sold extraordinarily well and received, like his first there, (which the young David Sylvester had commended highly for "its no mean technical skill") warm critical praise - the painter Harold Cohen in Arts Review observing that "his pictures are honest, trusting, warm, loving, in a word, human" - this was still not enough on which to support a young family. Increasingly Hugh was forced to take on more and more teaching until he was virtually full-time at Central, Kingston and St. Martins, and latterly at Hornsey also, both in painting and textiles, leaving him consequently less and less time for his own painting. Yet, though there were periods when he was forced to stop altogether, this was never final - a masterly work like Interior at Teesdale Road (see below, the family home at the time), for example, dates from the early 60s when he was not only teaching but taking on consultancy work from textile companies to make ends meet. In its calm orderliness of structure, an echo one feels of Dutch C17th. painting, and the quiet but high-pitched colour that has more to do with Bonnard, (whom he has come increasingly to regard as one of the most important painters of C20th) it exudes an entirely contemporary sense of domestic affection and warmth that carries no trace of the stresses he must have been feeling in the rest of his life.

© Nicholas Usherwood
February 2006

Interior of Teesdale Road (with Betty) 1970 Acrylic on canvas 36 x 48 (91 x 122cm)

 

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