Patrick Hayman

There are two letters and one postcard from Patrick Hayman to Ruth Borchard. The letters are dated 1965, and were sent from Barnes, south-west London. The postcard seems to have been written in the same year, and illustrates in black-and-white the artist's 1959 painting The Fall of Byzantium.

In this first letter, Hayman writes:

I would be delighted to let you have a self-portrait for 20 guineas... I think your idea is a charming one & that a collection of contemporary self-portraits will be extremely valuable. (A book on the subject of British ones, w'd be invaluable) [sic] I think it is extremely original and brave of you to undertake such a thing. And originality is rare these days...

I am working on one or two self-portraits now (one in oil & one in tempera, gouache etc.) & when they are finished I'd be happy for you to have one... I'll contact you shortly about this & send or bring one down to you.

I am extremely interested in portrait painting & love doing them: but the number of self-portraits I have done is rather few & the early ones are all gone. There was (a v. good I think) self-portrait in my recent exhibition at The Grosvenor – called

                       'SELF-PORTRAIT AS A FLYING-MACHINE'

This was reproduced in the catalog [sic] & in one or two periodicals. I w'd have loved you to have this in your collection – but at the moment the painting is going in to some Arts Festival & as far as I know is already reproduced in their forthcoming catalog.

In the second letter, he writes:

I have finished the self-portrait I was doing for you: this is a small oil – one of the best I've ever done & in fact quite the best self-portrait. It'll be some time before it will be dry enough to frame but I'd like to get it to you before I leave on vacation.

In his postcard, he notes:

It was delightful seeing you yesterday [in Reigate]. Thank you so much for your kindness... I hope you'll come to see us [Patrick and his wife Barbara]. I'm extremely exhausted at the moment & we're hoping for some rest – if that's possible in this world – in Cornwall.

Hayman wrote these poetically perspicacious words on the nature of painting in general, and portrait painting in particular:

It is important, I believe, to enter another world than the visible one and by painting something which appears to be the opposite of what one sees in nature, it may be possible, momentarily, to enter different state of being. This applies also in the realm of portrait painting where to see another person one has to put oneself aside in order to perceive and to stand humbly before the other world of a distant personality for which one seeks like an explorer without maps in an arctic waste. The map of a face expresses things from which geography might learn.'

(from 'A Painter's Notes' by Patrick Hayman, The Painter and Sculptor, 1959-60).

Hayman's 1965 self-portrait, painted in oil on board, takes the form of a border-cropped close-up of the artist's face. It is, characteristically for him, a small and impressively intimate work of art (he always preferred to work on a small scale – and admired fellow artists like Gwen John whose modestly proportioned, humane works he considered intensely focussed . The arctic brilliancy of the artist's complexion contrasts strongly with the pitch black backdrop – like the moon shining in the night sky, an orb of enlightenment. What Hayman had to say about a later painting in which the lovers' bluish features are irradiated with white, may be applied to this work: 'They say the external light fluctuates: also perhaps the inner light too. It is the inner illumination.'

Hayman was round fifty years old when he painted this enigmatic picture. His still, grave, melancholic presence is conjured up through typically sensuous colourism – but one rooted in tones that, strictly speaking, 'appear to be the opposite of what one sees in nature'. Blueish-back paint veering to purple evokes his wavy dark hair and thick moustache and beard. The dazzling complexion is composed of a subtle admixture of white, grey, a hint of pinkish brown. Hayman often created an impalpable chalky or nacreous atmosphere by over-painting on layers of still discernible white. Dark brushstrokes delineate the lips, resembleing a blackened pool between thickets of moustache and beard, the thick spectacles above the wistful eyes, the strongly sculpted nose. The use of a powerful dark armature against luminous colour is reminiscent of the transporting visionary effects of diverse kinds of art which Hayman admired – notably Byzantine icons, medieval stained glass, and Rouault's paintings. The painting appears suffused by the mystical atmosphere of what the 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan called 'a deep but dazzling darkness'.

Hayman once wrote, 'One cannot look directly at the sun, an oblique approach is necessary.' In this self-portrait, oblique notes of quizzical humour seem tenderly to mask the artist's quite devastating insights about himself as a vulnerable, suffering all-too-human being.

Hayman was born in London in 1915 to Jewish parents who had met and married in New Zealand. Awareness of the sea and 'events' in the sky – whether aeroplanes, rockets or of an indeterminate nature – preoccupied him from early childhood. A gentle, pacific man, but one aware of a fiercely angry side to himself (which erupted especially when confronted by reactionary, philistine and racist views), he became a lifelong pacifist at his English public school. He travelled by boat to live in New Zealand in 1936, and the voyage, via Jamaica and the Panama Canal, proved to be a kind of rebirth. It signified to him later a symbolic journey, one from petty restrictiveness to pioneering openness, as portrayed and paralleled in the novels, which he so admired, of the enigmatic German(?)/Mexican novelist, B. Traven.

Hayman went on to meet culturally lively young people in Dunedin, and during some long periods spent alone in isolated farming areas, he experienced a mystical sense of what he called 'a no-feeling, a feeling of nothingness'. It was after returning to Dunedin from one of these trips that he began to paint. 'It really burst out of me with a great ease and relief', he later said. He studied painting part-time at the King Edward Technical College in Dunedin, which, as he explained, 'was so marvellous because it was so disorganised. They left me totally alone.' In this non-academic environment, he made friends with the young avant-garde painter Colin McCahon (1919-1987), who proved to be in time one of New Zealand's most eminent artists.

Living in a bedsitting room in Wellington in 1942 onwards, Hayman created many paintings whose imagery of lovers in landscapes, voyagers at sea, women and aeroplanes, questing solitaries, set the tone for a life's work. Reading widely in imported art journals, he felt at once akin to certain artists, notably Munch, Nolde, Chagall, Schwitters, the American visionary Albert Pinkham Ryder, and from England, Christopher Wood and Alfred Wallis, the Cornish fisherman 'primitive', whose intuitive sophistication Hayman much prized. He also was profoundly moved by Maori art, the geometric intricacy of many traditional caravings, depictions of mythical creatures such as birdsmen and water monsters, their fluidity of perspective and economy of form, as well as Maori reverence for Nature– as later by the collection of Inuit carvings assembled in Canada by the London-based art dealer Charles Gimpels, who was 'a gifted photographer with a mission to record the life and culture of the Inuits of the Canadian Eastern Arctic, whose carvings the gallery first showed (a first in Europe) in 1953' (Obituary of Charles's brother, 'Peter Gimpel: Co-founder of Gimpel Fils who helped shape the artistic taste of a generation' by Roger Berthoud, The Independent, 18th June 2005).

A symbolic, autobiographical painting, Setting Out on His Way (1945), portraying a young man, babylike in mien yet resolute on his white horse, sounds the questing note of thee New Zealand periuod. The way in which a tree's branches here extend out in abstract rhythms, fragmenting into shapes of blue and white, seems partly to suggest the path about to be taken – further and further... into unknown country' (to quote from a favourite passage of Hayman's from Katherine Mansfield's story 'The Prelude' (1920), describing a dray-ride by two young children journeying to a new house near Wellington) – both in imaginative and painterly terms.

On his return to England in 1947, Hayman was soon on friendly terms with painters such as Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, John Minton, Keith Vaughan (q.v.) and Prunella Clough. He especially admired the Polish-born painter Jankel Adler (1895-1949), who came to Britain during the Second World War and went on greatly to influence painters such as Colquhoun and MacBryde, as 'a very interesting person, deeply involved in Jewish mysticism'. In 1950, with Barbara May Judson, whom he had recently married, Hayman went to Cornwall for the first time. In conversation with the author, he later recalled the fishing village of Mevagissey as 'marvellously beautiful with this terribly bleak winter; I always remember it being almost black and white.' His 1965 self-portrait, itself almost bleakly black-and-white, has just this kind of beauty.

A turning point was a visit to St Ives on Christmas Day in 1950. 'While lunching on sandwiches on a wonderfully clear Christmas Day of sun and light, I noticed [the furniture maker] Robin Nance's shop near the Sloop [Inn] and saw a painting by Peter Lanyon in the window. Add to this the fact that I felt as we came in through Carbis Bay a feeling in miniature of New Zealand, the dark pine trees, the azure sea, the hills and wide expanse of ocean and I became convinced we must return and live in St Ives.' They did so in March 1951, settling initially in a tiny flat overlooking Carbis Bay, staying there  until the summer of 1953, returning for long periods until the 1970s. From 1947 onwards, Hayman immersed himself in the experience of Cornwall. He went on to develop close relationships with the writer and painter Lionel Miskin (1923-2006), and the painter Peter Lanyon (1918-1964). The latter, whom he found 'very amusing to be with; he was tremendously alive', took him on long, exploratory car journeys of local exploration. Lanyon wrote in 1954, 'I admire Pat's courage', saying he believed his work 'will prove to be embracing... the most secret moments of our being'. Two years earlier, Barbara Hepworth had written to Hayman, 'There are so many of your paintings which I should love to have... Both the colour and calligraphy (as well as the whole poetic idea) mean a lot to me.'

For Hayman,'Cornwall continued in a way the NZ experience (pacific)… a sea land mythology.' In a poem addressed to 'Alfred Wallis – Sailor, Rag and Bone Man, Painter' – Hayman identified qualities in the St Ives ex-fisherman artist akin to his own – as visionary solitary and non-academic artist creating against all odds, transforming bits of detritus ('rags') into vehicles of expression::

He painted schooners

ships of his soul

not empty vessels

in a school

The rags were sails

that bore his dreams away

brave and lonely at Madron Worhouse

where he lay

(Wallis died penniless in the Madron Workhouse, near Penzance, in 1942.)

In the 1950s and 60s, Hayman painted many Cornish landscapes, with a church, or a house, sometimes with one or two figures, in which the atmosphere is one of mysteriously tender, heavenly seclusion, partly reminiscent of the valleys of Samuel Palmer and the inland, wooded scenes of Alfred Wallis. In The Spirit of Alfred Wallis Descending near Porthmeor Beach (1970) – descending, that is, in the form of a parachutist – Hayman paid surreal, affectionate homage to the great fisherman naif.

For Hayman, early aeroplanes were a rich source of poetic myth. He had flown often in New Zealand – 'a miraculous experience in these tiny planes, flying low over the mountains', and admired the American Hart Crane's poetry and Antoine de Saint-Exupery's novels celebrating pioneer aviators. Self Portrait as a Flying Machine (1965), in which the artist's bearded countenance has become the front part of a biplane, is an amazing, precipitous image of self-transcendence.

Following a heart attack in 1970, a new depth of feeling emerged in Hayman's work. In a 1972 portrait of a Visionary Person, depicted beside a blazing bouquet of flowers, the broad, purplish-complexioned features (set against a creamy yellowish sky) are abstractly accentuated like those of some archaic tribal mask.

Hayman made many paintings based on his own intimately lyrical, non-heroic interpretations of historical, religious, literary and poetic characters. Subjects included Moses, Christ, Joan of Arc, St Francis, Lear, Macbeth, Alice in Wonderland, King Arthur, Dreyfus, the Mexican Zapata, Walt Whitman and Nelson. Ire at injustice fuelled many of his paintings, such as his subversive, elegant drawing of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Murdered by the Nazis (c.986), in which a Swatika-eyed beast lashes out its tongue at the pastor, imprisoned in a barbaric cage.  A recurrent and clearly autobiographical figure in his pictures is a black-hatted, bearded man in Chassidic garb, often with his hands seen to be raised in an attitude of plaintive poignancy.

Hayman's Dadaist-like montages – such as Shoe-Bird (mid-1980s), in which a wooden shoe-tree, once his grandfather's, has a bird and a human face painted on it – convey a quite tangible, impish magic. From Spring 1958 to Spring 1963, Hayman edited and produced The Painter & Sculptor, a  quarterly journal concentrating mostly on figurative artists at a time when the Abstract Movement was in international ascendance. There were essays on the German Expressionists, such as Paula Modersohn-Becker and Emil Nolde, and on the contemporary Australian painters of poetic myth, Arthur Boyd, Sydney Nolan and Albert Tucker. Other artists discussed or otherwise illustrated included Peter Blake, Kurt Schwitters, Cecil Collins (q.v.), Diego Rivero and Ben Shahn. Cinematic masters – Bergman, Eisenstein, Kurosawa – were brilliantly explored by the writer Marie Seton. Not only these contents but also his editorials and 'Painter's Notes' cast much light on Hayman's own interests, thoughts and feelings.

A volume of Hayman's own beautiful Illustrated Poems was published by the Louise Hallett Gallery in London in 1986 (with an introduction by the author). Six of his paintings are illustrated in Self-Taught and Outsider Art: The Anthony Petullo Collection(University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2001). Anthony Petullo included Hayman in his collection (which included Alfred Wallis and many untrained artists such as the British visionaries Madge Gill and Scottie Wilson), noting the following paradox in his preface: 'Patrick Hayman is a trained artist whose work has all the features of self-taught or outsider art.' Petullo illustrated Girl on Sofa with Cat (1964), a radiant and joyously fluid gouache portrait of the artist's wife Barbara.

Hayman's work was collected by the Arts Council of Great Britain, and he attracted a dedicated following in Britain, New Zealand and Canada. He had many one-man shows; venues included Victor Musgrave's Gallery One, London (1954); Helen Lessore's Beaux Arts Gallery, London (1963);  Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1973); University of Saskatchewan, Sasakatoon, Canada (1974 and 1985), Blond Fine Art, London (1984), Crane Kalman Gallery, London (1986). He exhibited in 'St Ives 1939-64' at the Tate Gallery, London in 1985. There was a South Bank Touring Exhibition of his work in 1990. Waldemar Januszczak's comment in The Guardian (10th October 1986) on a late exhibition was felicitous: 'Marvellous, impish expressionism from an eternally youthful old painter.'

Ironically, it took the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery, University of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, prompted by Professor Peter Millard, to organise in 1985 the only major retrospectve held in a public gallery in his lifetime. He never visited North America, but had always read widely in American literature – especially Melville, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, Hart Crane. His work stirred deep chords in Canadian collectors and academics, and the Canadian Riel Rebellion became a natural subject for him. He wrote to Peter Millard: 'Yes it is a strange Odyssey from NZ to London to St Ives to London to Canada: there seems an inner logic to it all – perhaps a search for the new world or the search for a new world... the Amerika of everyone's Dreams.'

In his wide-ranging study of the artist, Patrick Hayman: Visionary Artist (Belgrave Gallery, London and St Ives, 2005), Mel Gooding wrote that 'In the universe of his art New Zealand and Canada, the Western prairies, Mexico and the Holy land, St Ives and the Thames became mythic territories, places where are enacted the fables of his emotional and moral imaginings...

'There was something of the magus in his mode of operation.'

As I wrote in an essay published two years after his death in 1988, '[Patrick Hayman] was a man of unusually wide human sympathies and tireless intellectual curiosity, the fruits of which – appearing in his art as in his alert, witty, endlessly cross-referenced conversation – were never divorced from his real feelings.'

First of all quoting the artist himself – '… out of the fragments of his life, the artist constructs his own universe...' – I noted in a catalogue essay for the 'South Bank Centre Touring Exhibition, 'Patrick Hayman: A Voyage of Discovery' (1990) that 'Hayman was fascinated by stories, myths, legends as ways of revealing truth. The story of his own life and family background became, for him, almost mythic in the telling. The years 1930 to 1955 were... his most physically active and questing. The remainder of his life – spent sequestered mostly in his studio in Putney and then in Barnes – was that of continued imaginative discovery, but no longer of quest in a more itinerant... sense...

'He cast aside landsmen's prejudices on his voyage of discovery... He described the artist as 'a creator like Jacob who needed a ladder to see more.' What Hayman illuminated so uniquely are marvellous secret territories running [in his words] 'counter to nature'.'