Painting to printmaking and back again: Herter Art Gallery hosts Hanlyn Davies retrospective
By Bonnie Wells, Published on October 05, 2007
By the time he was 16 years old, Hanlyn Davies was already a nationally recognized artist in his native Wales. With his painting "Depression," depicting images of social strife and the ravages of unemployment, he'd won a UK-wide secondary schools art competition that netted him a weekend at the Duke of Bedford's Woburn Abbey, where he saw his first authentic Rembrandts.
A year shy of a half century later, the Herter Art Gallery at the University of Massachusetts opens a 35-year retrospective exhibition of Davies' work with a reception Oct. 11, from 4 to 6:30 p.m. "Inside/Out" includes some 74 works created from 1972, two years after Davies joined the faculty of the UMass art department, to the present.
"It's an interesting experience to go back over all the stuff and create a cohesive sense of the work," Davies said last week in a conversation about the show. "You see the threads that are there - you see your habits, you see your concerns - with a pungent force."
He takes a beat and adds, "And I suppose it also encourages you to go on."
After 36 years at UMass, Davies retired last year from full-time teaching, though he still teaches two classes and coordinates the Five-College Avanced Drawing Seminars, traveling up from New Haven, where he has lived since 1998.
He had studied painting and printmaking at Swansea College of Art in Wales, before earning his M.F.A. in painting from Yale University. By the time he arrived at UMass he had added sculpture to his oeuvre, and was at the threshold of a fascination with creating art with offset lithography, which would fuel his muse for the next 15 years.
Marrying art & technology
Davies speaks with great appreciation of the former Hamilton I. Newell, Inc., the longtime Amherst commercial printing company whose sympathetic proprietor, Norman Newell, permitted him evening access to the facilities to pursue his experiments in offset lithography.
For an artist accustomed to solitary creation, there was something attractive about the collaboration with technicians, management and later, other artists, he said. But he was also drawn to what he likes to call the "perverted function" of using a commercial press to create art. He enjoyed exploring the edges of that, enjoyed the conundrums and challenges of intruding himself into that situation designed for different purposes, the "ad hoc-ist" immediacy of it.
In a 2005 profile of Davies written by University of Wales professor M. Wynn Thomas in the magazine Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Thomas hints at the origins of such a penchant:
"[His father] loved nothing better than to practice the magic of transformation by making something out of nothing, turning a cow's horn into a carving, or bringing home dolls' heads and animals made from rubber in order to cast them in concrete and supply them with glass eyes."
Then too, there was the alluring alchemy of printmaking. "The four-color system is kind of magical," Davies said. "Red, yellow, blue, black - and when they come together, they give up their identity and become all the colors."
In a process akin to playing, he said, Davies used the detritus of the shop, bits and bobs of paper and other materials, as well as photography, drawing and collage to explore his signature artistic themes - the tension of internal and external, comfort and peril, reflections on the world of art and the world in general.
Again, from Thomas' profile, "Hanlyn was born and raised in lower Brynteg Road, an area he came to view as a border territory, a no man's land... Here different physical and social landscapes seemed to meet without ever merging, and it is to this phenomenon that he attributes his lifelong interest, as an artist, in strange meetings, shared spaces, confronting shapes and patterns; his compositional proclivity has always been for juxtaposition, for co-existence rather than harmony."
To share the novel experiment, Davies also enjoyed traveling the country to present demonstrations at commercial print shops. Later he joined with a handful of other local artists, faculty colleagues and former students interested in exploring new printmaking technologies, who began to exhibit internationally as the group Artists Research-Technology Inc.
A return to painting
Still, by 1987 Davies was ready to return to painting, to deal more directly with his images, more hands-on, as he puts it.
"It was also an emotional change," he said, "for the work to become more personal and autobiographical. Early on it was a more formal exploration, to see what the [printmaking] process could offer me."
That summer, he returned to painting during a monthlong stay at Yaddo, the artists' community located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. The first painting to emerge, "Parallax/Landseer (And How He Was Led Astray)" in acrylic and oil on canvas, appears in the Herter show.
"Parts of the painting reflect the earlier work," he said, in that the 73- by 135-inch piece in two panels juxtaposes and translates in paint two separate lithographs he had completed years earlier.
The title quotes a headline from a London Times review of an exhibit by 19th-century English painter and sculptor Edwin Henry Landseer by the art critic John Russell in the early '60s. And one of two representational elements in the painting, a stag's head, is a visual quote from Landseer's seminal 1851 painting "Monarch of the Glen."
By contrast, Davies most recent work, the "Brynteg Lights" series of paintings, created from the late 1990s to the present, are autobiographical, harkening to some of his earliest memories of life in his Welsh village.
Thomas speaks of a remarkable found object, a twisted piece of metal resembling a human figure that Davies' father brought home one day and installed in the house, which turns up with frequency in the "Brynteg Lights" series.
Several paintings in the series are included in the retrospective, and two grace the front and back covers of the Autumn 2007 issue of the Massachusetts Review.
"The paintings contain images of great personal significance, almost touchstones of my own memories, whether they are accurate or not," Davies said. "They're made up of images that are as significant and truthful as I can make them as I interpret the world around me."
And for the viewer?
"I'm trying to make a compelling image," Davies said, "so that when a person comes and stands before that image, it holds them and will stay with them."
Quoted from http://www.amherstbulletin.com/story/id/61350/