Scenes from the Comedy of Art, Paintings by Douglas Hyslop
Joe Bernstein
rec.arts.sf.written, and that is why I've cross-posted it as I have;
but I think that is also the group whose readers are most likely to
be interested in the paintings I'm writing about, which is why I've
set followups to go there, without much confidence that I'm right (or
that there'll be followups anyway...). Wondering: why isn't there
a group for SF art?
This is to some extent a review of a show at the art galleries of
the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Memorial Union. The show
is Douglas Hyslop's <Scenes from the Comedy of Art>, comprising
sixteen paintings in acrylics, and closes September 8. The Union
is open quite long hours; the galleries close, I think, at 10 p.m.
most nights.
The shortest way to put my point is that I think Douglas Hyslop has, in
this cycle, accomplished something close to world-creation; his
paintings have cumulative force. Some of them are powerful in their
own right, and I personally think the world of fantasy publishing
would be a better one if one or two publishers were buying some of
them. I think they're worth some attention from Madisonians or
enthusiasts of painting in general - hence the cross-posting - but
I specifically think readers of speculative fiction will find things
in them worth seeing.
Douglas Hyslop appears to have been showing paintings from this cycle
around Madison for years. On the Web, a number of paintings (none of
which are in the show I've seen) are visible from a December 1997
show at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters:
<http://www.wisconsinacademy.org/gallery/HYSLP.html>
One more painting, also not from the current show and with no title
given, memorialises a March 1999 show at Mother Fool's Coffeehouse;
unlike the previous ones, this thumbnail does *not* link to a larger
picture, but anyway:
<http://www.motherfools.com/shows99.html>
There is a black-and-white rendition of one of the paintings, not
one of my favourites, on the Memorial Union's page about the
current show:
<http://www.sit.wisc.edu/~wudart/schedule.htm>
Beyond that, alas, you have only what little I can offer by way of
description. I'm not much of an art critic, unfortunately. Google
reveals no attempts at criticism superior to mine, worse yet.
Hyslop's own self-description for the show focuses on technique, I
guess. He notes that his figures (mostly human) are idealised, as
are those of classical art (though not in the same way); he notes
that he tends to treat colour separately from figure, and indeed
even I can see that this is central to the way his paintings look.
His characters are mostly drawn, however loosely, from some sort of
image of the <Commedia dell'Arte>; he cites Pierrot and Columbine
in his self-description, and several of the best paintings feature
Harlequin. (Someone wrote in the guestbook that they thought this
alluded to paintings by Picasso; I wouldn't know.) Their backdrop
looks to me like the nineteenth-century performers' demimonde of,
say, the movie <Children of Paradise> [1], but it's noteworthy that
it's a world in which there is no Audience. I mean, we are not
there, we the great consuming public; quite a few of his paintings
show the performers performing, but always for each other, to help
each other or comfort each other in their pathos. The backdrop is
not constant; in one painting a character is eating ice cream, while
in another, a woman sits in a room from some mediaeval castle.
That said, the majority of the paintings do fit in to this relatively
mundane world, in which the only similarity to speculative fiction is
that world's emotional consistency, the sense one gets that indeed
here *are* weary performers, free from their Public, no matter how
diverse the scenes in which they appear.
(All dimensions given as heightxwidth, thus a painting that's 94"x2" is
very tall and narrow, not very wide and short.)
<Ball-Balance Act>, not at all the same painting as appears by that
name at <http://www.wisconsinacademy.org/gallery/1997exhibits.html#december>
(this one is much quieter, and shows two girls, by appearance sisters,
one balancing on the ball and the other next to it, both watching
the viewer, against a background of pinkish pastels). 50"x38", $3,000.
<Gypsy Concert by the Sea>. 48"x60", $5,000.
<Song for a Blue Bird>, perhaps my favourite of these, shows I think
a mother and child (these pictures are representational but not always
clear), the mother performing (violin?); a blue bird is off to one side,
but I'd like to think there's a genuine ambiguity as to whether the
bird or a blue child is the real audience for the song. 48"x36", $3,000.
<Ice Cream Sunday>, a rather bright blue painting with several people
in it, one seated at a table on which stands a sundae. 48"x38", $3,000.
<End of the Song>. 50"x36", $3,000.
<Spanish Fan-Dance>. 60"x48", $5,000.
<Masquerade in a Spanish Cafe>, an unusually complex and colourful
canvas that nevertheless doesn't really reach me. 60"x50", $10,000.
<Jester's Family>. 54"x36", $3,000.
<The Fog Comes in at Twilight>, a brooding Novembery picture in which
the bugle someone plays (maybe "Taps"?) is blowing fire, the one
bright spot in the encroaching dusk. The other best of these.
48"x60", $10,000.
<Song for a Beggar>, in which the performer stands above the bowed
beggar, against a bright pink backdrop. 48"x36", $3,000.
Perhaps I should also include <Mother's Prayer> here; this is also,
at any rate, a scene of ordinary life, though there's no obvious
sign of performance nor is the mother obviously a performer by trade.
This shows a woman bent over praying, in a high stone room lit only by
a window far above, next to a large, empty cradle, all in gray, white,
and blue. I found it good but it did not affect me very much; the
guest book's writers, however, seemed to agree it was the best of the
lot. 46"x36", $3,000.
This leaves five paintings with at least tenuous speculative content.
Two feature Humpty Dumpty; I found neither all that interesting.
<Humpty Dumpty Meets Alice> (I think this is the one shown in black
and white on the Union art galleries' page, but it might be the
other one). 48"x38", $3,000.
<Humpty Dumpty's Champagne Party>. 50"x40", $3,000.
The other three are quite different from the rest; it makes sense
that they're by the same artist, but I'm not sure that if you did
the artistic equivalent of a police line-up or blind taste test,
people would immediately associate these with the quieter paintings
above. These are the Harlequin paintings, and they differ as follows:
1) They are brightly coloured, mostly in black, orange, and white;
2) They use cubist techniques to elicit chaos - for example to show
flames, or to show an only partly visible horse in agony (I didn't
see this on my own, a guest book writer mentioned it);
3) Harlequin is not a weary performer, but a world-wrecker.
<Harlequin Brings the Night>, pretty much what it says: Harlequin
whips his chariot forward, blackness in its wake. 60"x96", $10,000.
<Harlequin Goes to the Sun>, Phaethon with rage rather than despair.
94"x59", $10,000.
<Harlequin Curses the Heavens>, a largely black canvas that could
be the aftermath of the visit to the sun. 96"x60", $10,000.
These paintings are what inspired me to think of this post in the
first place, and whatever people might see in the others, I should
think *many* readers of fantasy or even of science fiction would
rejoice to see these. They have mythic strength.
I have trouble imagining Hyslop, at least as the creator of *these*
paintings, doing book covers to order; I mean, for all I know he
actually has a thriving commercial art business (though if so, it's
not visible on the Web anyway), but these paintings do nothing to
suggest one. Nor is it obvious to me that there are novels out there
growing on trees for which tired <Commedia dell'Arte> characters,
let alone a furious Harlequin, would be good illustrations! I think
Karl Edward Wagner's old <Year's Best Horror> is the sort of book I
can see one of these paintings gracing, and wonder if David Hartwell
has covers lined up already for his next several fantasy volumes.
So realistically, no, I don't foresee that Douglas Hyslop will be
storming the lofty heights occupied by Thomas Canty or Michael Whelan
anytime soon, if ever. Which makes it even more of a pity that I was
having computer and other problems when this show opened, and didn't
promptly post about it then. But if anyone *can* get to see it before
it closes, I do recommend it. And Google, at least, claims that Douglas
Hyslop has never been mentioned before on Usenet; with that now corrected,
at any rate *somewhere* there's *something* written about his work...
Joe Bernstein
[1] Oh, <Children of Paradise>. Movie made in occupied France during
WWII, which Turner Classic Movies claims is the <Gone with the Wind>
of France. It depicts four primary characters, all of them 19th-century
demimondains - one is a pioneering mime, one a twopenny thief and tough.
It's three or four hours and worth every minute of them.
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://these-survive.postilion.org/>