DAVID, DYLAN &

DAVID, DYLAN & 

THE GRID PAINTINGS

Dylan Thomas

David Haughton 'Grid' oil painting

David Haughton © the Estate of William Crozier

I was reminded recently of David talking to me of the implications and ancestry of his direction in respect of his 'grid' paintings, citing the medieval paintings at the V&A and the comics read as a child; ("Little pictures which would make up  

a complete picture."), when past Haughton student Bob Claytor wrote to me of  looking at an old hardback copy of "Asterix in Switzerland" which David gave him: 



"I remember him speaking of how marvellous some of the compositions within the comic book frames were."

Another past student of David's, Simon Mills has supplied the following recollection which teasingly tells of a planned grid which would form a text, little pictures which would make up a poem:

"I remember the legendary visits to his studio, stopping off at the off-licence on the way for a small bottle of tonic, a large bottle of gin, a packet of crumpets and half a pound of butter. He never touched the tonic himself. The evening was spent stumbling around among those extraordinary paintings getting progressively more drunk.
We used to sit together in The Princess Louise in Holborn at lunchtime over a few pints of Guinness and he would get quite lyrical about the light coming through the skylight illuminating the cigarette smoke high up in the back bar. He took great delight in pointing out the way the strange shapes in the marble slab over the urinals in the pub toilet looked like penises. When I revisited the pub recently with my teenage son I asked him what he thought they looked like and he got David's association straight away.
I remember him talk about how walking long distances caused him to hallucinate which helped him see the world in a different light. He told me that it was all about starving the brain of oxygen in the same way as fasting or climbing very high mountains does. He would frequently walk all day without a break and one of his walks was along the Grand Union Canal through Berkhamsted, where I grew up.

Yellow Grid  Date painted: 1967–1972

• Oil on canvas, 122 x 91.5 cm
  Collection: Arts Council Collection

He had planned to do a collaboration with his old friend and drinking chum, Dylan Thomas. It was to have been a big grid painting with each square having a letter in it. The letters being a poem that Thomas was going to write for him. David would then have worked his magic with his flickering colours and calligraphic shapes that would break out of the rigidity of the grid. The result would have been very powerful but sadly I think they were never sober enough when they got together to make it happen.
My old friend and fellow student, Steven Robson, once described David's grid paintings as looking like the burning wreckage of an airship. 
I remember David telling me that his move from abstraction back to representation was some kind of epiphany. He described how he felt himself drawn to revisit the theme of the group of houses on the skyline in St. Ives and the turmoil of the foreground in an irresistible way. I was astonished at the extraordinary vigour with which he then explored every detail of that subject. He had an almost ferocious intensity of seeing. 
He was the most generous of spirit and the most supportive of anyone I had the good fortune to be taught by."

Dylan Thomas in Cornwall

Cornwall was the holiday destination of choice for the London bohemian set in the thirties, and Dylan Thomas’ friend, the poet Norman Cameron, ensured he met the writer Wyn Henderson, who invited him to her cottage, Polgigga at Porthcurno, near Penzance, between April and May 1936.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

At The Ship Inn, in Mousehole, where they regularly drank, there is a corner of the bar called ‘Dylan’s Corner’.

He wrote to Cameron’s wife, Elfriede, on 25 April: ‘Mousehole is the best village. I want to live [here], not with Wyn but cosy and cheaply with something dumb and lovely of my own choice, with a woman who hasn’t been psycho-analysed or rodgered (sic) by celebrities’.

On 11th July 1937 Dylan and Caitlin were married in Penzance Registry Office. Wyn Henderson paid for the licence and the couple honeymooned at the ‘Lobster Pot’, Henderson’s guest house in Mousehole.

http://www.thewordtravels.com

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Due to planned maintenance work within the galleries at Penlee Gallery & Museum, Penzance, the DAVID HAUGHTON exhibition has been postponed until January 2018. 

This gives the team at Penlee extra time to gather interest and promises of loans, and for this blog to find its way to even more Haughton enthusiasts and collectors.

If this includes you, please do not hesitate to email me at stephenprince.artist@yahoo.co.uk

(www.stephenprince.co.uk)

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