Visual arts review: Toying with some ideas

Published on Monday 3 August 2009 19:32

REMEMBERING LITTLE SPARTA 1993-2009 **** EDINBURGH COLLEGE OF ART PETER BLAKE – 'VENICE' *** EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS

IAN Hamilton Finlay was a master of concrete poetry, or poetry in physical form. He also relied on partnerships with other artists for the realisation of his poetic/visual ideas. After all, you would not expect to read a poet's work in manuscript.

Finlay also made things himself, and in ECA's exhibition devoted to his partnership with watercolour artist Janet Boulton, one particularly fascinating display is a small collection of wooden toys he made in the early sixties. These have simple shapes and bright colours, but as toys, they also point to the way his work was to develop .

Playfulness was always part of both the man and his work, but also toys as they are used by children are not a thing in themselves. They are a route to something else. Like Alice's looking glass they are a gateway for the imagination to a richer world beyond. This is exactly how Finlay's mature art functioned.

These toys include some rather beautiful things, a line of grey wooden fish suspended on a string between yellow wooden posts, for instance, or three blue umbrellas balanced one on the other above a yellow wooden base. A good many of these toys are ships, however. This is no surprise. Throughout his life Finlay was fascinated by ships and boats and everything maritime and he used ship imagery constantly in his work.

He also collected model ships. There is a display of these here too. Together with his wooden toys, they were displayed around the house at Little Sparta, not just for decoration perhaps, but as vessels for the imaginative voyages of his art, or just as passing ships on the wide sea of his imagination. It is thus that Janet Boulton paints them in a series of luminous still-lifes of scenes around the house. Most striking of these are paintings of model yachts seen against the windows with the light coming through their sails.

As these delicate, atmospheric paintings reveal, Boulton's cooperation with the artist, which continued over a good many years, was not so much a matter of executing his ideas in particular works as providing a broader visual commentary on his world. These paintings of the boats and toys around the house give an insight, not only into his artistic imagination and his playfulness, but also into the domestic and familiar roots of the inspiration that often took him so far from the homely context in which it was born.

In a series of more elaborate still-lifes, Boulton records the interior of the outhouse that was for a time the Temple of Apollo, but which, for pressure of space and because of the increasing demand for work for exhibitions was latterly used as a store and workshop. Works like the various revolutionary watering-cans give the room a gardening feel, but among these mundane objects stand the figures of Apollo and Aphrodite.

Nevertheless, Boulton does not record these things in a state of haphazard indignity. Instead she sees echoes of Czanne in these accidental still-lifes and so, by invoking the master, she illuminates from an unexpected angle Finlay's own dialogue with the pictorial language of modernism which Czanne fathered.

Not everything here is in watercolour, however. Boulton complements on Finlay's own imagery more directly in a series of reliefs. A set of these relate to the ship sculptures in the Roman Garden, a small, enclosed part of the wider garden at Little Sparta. In it, Finlay pays a double homage to the ancient Romans and to the great Renaissance gardens at Villa d'Este and Boulton recreates this in a series both of watercolours and of reliefs. The most independent work here however is a set of four paper reliefs bearing statements by Finlay, like his lapidary description of that environment as the Fluted Land, for instance, which she pairs with beautiful long, narrow panoramas of the wider landscapes of the garden and its setting.

In one of his most memorable prints, Ian Hamilton Finlay, he sets the words of his poem Star Steer in glimmering silver against blue, mimicking starlight on water. This simple piece of printing is a great deal more telling than Peter Blake's use of diamond dust to add glitter to his prints dedicated to a very different kind of star, sixties pop-stars, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or Doris Day singing Once I Had a Secret Love. It is appropriate that Blake includes Warhol, similarly covered in glitter, among his stars. The American is clearly his model, though Blake might equally have included Damien Hirst. Hirst is master of art as commodity and that is this plainly what this is. Blake also presents his name in a set of five prints, one for each letter, that take their imagery from old-fashioned alphabet books. Nostalgia and the coy evocation of an imagined cosy past were always part of Blake's take on Pop Art.

Here in a set of prints inspired by Venice, he collages bits of archaic ephemera on to Venice's familiar cityscape. It is hard to see quite where that gets us, unless it is down some Venetian Penny Lane. The high point of Blake's career was the cover for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Here, in a piece of sixties film, we see the young Melvin Bragg solemnly discussing Blake's art. He is living his own nostalgia.

&149 Remembering Little Sparta until 30 August; Peter Blake – Venice until 29 August