Water-Colour Murals of Technology

Leonardo

Water-Colour Murals of TechnologyAuthor(s): Theodore HancockSource: Leonardo, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer, 1972), pp. 199-202Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1572375 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 5, pp. 199-202. Pergamon Press 1972. Printed in Great Britain

WATER-COLOUR MURALS OF

TECHNOLOGY

Theodore Hancock*

Abstract-The author describes how he was led to select themes based on the appearance of the city of New York and on landscapes and scenes arising from technology, ranging from oil refineries to space rockets to computers. He explains his reasons for preferring the medium of water-colour and he gives details on his method of making water-colour paintings on a mural scale.

I.

I started painting as a schoolboy in the nineteen- thirties. I was then at a school in Kent, situated on a spur of England's North Downs from the foot of which the Weald of Kent rolls away towards the sea. Water-colour is the landscape medium par excellence, nothing better captures the sudden English changes of weather, the hustling clouds and rain-laden skies. As a very young gunner subaltern, I was stationed towards the close of the World War II in both Italy and Greece, near Naples and Athens. The impact of the southern warmth on the northern temperament is an old story in the history of Northern European culture but nonetheless exciting and often a turning point for the individual to whom it happens-Shelley, Keats and Van Gogh-there are parallels in the other arts.

These early lessons, absorbed almost instinctively without the conscious purpose of becoming 'an artist', I applied to the landscape of the New World when I was on a Fellowship to Brown University in Rhode Island, in the fall of 1948. Going from an England still paying the austere penalties of World War II victory, I shall never forget the impact and excitement of New York on an October afternoon at the height of 'Indian Summer'. Here was a city, one of the most powerful and lustiest of contemporary western civilization, going full blast. For twenty years, I have been trying to capture something of the dynamism of this great city.

First, I made architectural drawings and repre- sentational city-scapes. Gradually the forms and patterns of New York became clearer, not only the soaring verticality but the extraordinary contrast of slum with Park Avenue, the realization that the buildings taken separately were not beautiful but that New York itself could be achingly beautiful at dawn and at dusk, by night, unbelievable, and by

* English artist. Address: P.O. Box 245, Bat Cave, N.C. 28710, U.S.A. (Received 29 November 1970).

day, always challenging. Eventually my answer came to the puzzle. New York, the melting pot, is a city of people, its "ambience" is in its streets, its neigh- bourhoods, the ghettos of Brooklyn and the Bronx. How to express what a contemporary American city does to people, and they to it, became a central theme of my work.

Landscape with figures is traditional subject matter and many painters have solved its problems in the language of their age from Giorgione's 'La Tempesta' to Picasso's 'Guernica'. I found that I could not express what I wanted without thinking in terms of the visual language that technology uses to create the city environment. Without many people spending thousands of man-hours poring over drawing boards and consulting charts, diagrams, graphs, architectural plans and, now more and more fre- quently, computers-a skyscraper, an urban de- velopment, Manhattan Island itself as it now is- would not exist. The pressures of city living on the psyche of the individual and the ethnic group produce the tension and violence that is the most extreme expression of this theme of a city and its people. My mural 'American City: Manhattan' (Fig. 1) is an attempt to paint the inner life of this city. In point of time, this mural came after the one I made for the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company, which I will describe later.

To express a part of the visual experience of our day, I felt I must incorporate the visual tools and the diagrammatic language of technology as it applies not only to the modern city but also to industry, to space exploration and to the Vietnam war.

What is the justification for being a representa- tional painter in the second half of the twentieth century? The impact of the camera and other techniques of making images on the artist have been much discussed in recent years [1, 2]. In spite of these developments, I am convinced that there is still a place for the artist who uses traditional media and who interprets or expresses his reactions to subject

199



Theodore Hancock

Fig. 1. 'American City: Manhattan', water-colour and Fig. 2. 'The Oil Industry', water-colour and ink, rag ink, rag paper on Masonite, 7-5 x 16 ft, 1968. paper on Masonite, 7-5 x 16 ft, 1967. (Commissioned by

the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company, Amsterdam, Unlllnnti -^A inetnllfo4 at Rim;no.r?<-ln rl 1 of D> In : ce

matter available to his unaided eyes in terms of a visual conception clearly described by Leonardo da Vinci.

As the years pass, I have come to believe that the most significant art in the world left to us is that of the Far East. The greater part of Oriental art was and still is conceived in water-colour terms. Water- colour is not opaque and heavy, as is oil painting. Line and wash, the twin graces of water-colour, are present in the concept of even the largest Oriental screens. But water-colour is still popularly thought of as a small scale medium, second in standing to oil painting.

My growing conviction that it could be handled today on a much larger scale than is now customary was fed by having a studio in New York, a block from the main entrance to the Metropolitan Museum and its great Oriental collection. I began to experi- ment with the mounting of rag paper on j inch thick composition board.

II.

It was not until the Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company of Amsterdam commissioned a mural on the theme of 'Man and Industry' (naturally, the oil industry) that I had the freedom to put a long imagined plan into practice.

Aided by the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I found a London firm employing a craftsman who knew much about the art of mounting and wedding paper to board. After preparing many panels, we arrived at a solution to the problem of mounting heavy water-colour paper to Masonite. The size of the panel was determined by the largest size of rag paper manufactured. I managed to secure the last two quires of a 240-lb rough surface water-colour paper made by Whatman before this two-hundred-year- old firm went out of business. Royal Dutch Shell provided studio space for me in their research laboratories at Amsterdam. I designed a trans- portable and free-standing easel simulating the wall where the mural would be finally installed. The panels were 2-5 x 4 ft and were mounted on battens. When I wished to work with the panels upright, I could paint with the whole mural assembled before me. But I was also able to detach one or more panels and work as one normally does with water-colours, flat or tilted. The dividing lines between the panels

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worried me-as did the whole technique-one could not really relax until the moment of final installation, when, fortunately, the efforts to stagger the panels like brickwork and to incorporate the divisions between the panels into the design worked satis- factorily. Nor shall I forget the first morning in Amsterdam when I walked into the studio to be confronted with the gleaming white surface of one hundred and twenty square feet of water-colour paper, free-standing in the middle of the vast and gloomy old laboratory.

Royal Dutch Shell was an understanding patron, asking only that I include one theme from the various branches of their petroleum industry and, indeed, gave me the go ahead seeing only a cartoon about twelve by five inches.

When the mural (Fig. 2) was installed in the Graduate School of Business of London University, to which the Company had presented the work, the problem of preservation had to be faced. I contact- ed the research departments of the paint manu- facturer, Winsor and Newton, Royal Dutch Shell and the National Gallery in London. It was eventually agreed that my first instinctive reaction, which was to treat a large water-colour like a small one, that is, to put it behind glass, was right. The stipulation was added to leave a half-inch gap between the glass and the surface of the painting. After two and a half years, the mural has shown no signs of warping.

Having produced a water-colour mural, I wanted to continue working on this scale and to prove, conclusively, that my ideas were good ones and that the oil industry mural was not just a lucky series of coincidences. Uppingham School in England was generous enough to put at my disposal a large Victorian classroom, redolent of Tom Brown's schooldays. I spent a summer and autumn painting two further works on a twin set of panels reordered from the same source. Now free from the demands of an industrial patron, I could paint on this large scale for the first time completely freely.

m.

In the fall of 1964, I was commissioned by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administra-

200



Water-Colour Murals of Technology

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Fig. 3. 'Man and Space', water-colour and ink, rag paper on Masonite, 7-5 x 16 ft, 1967. (Commissioned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

(NASA), Washington, D.C., U.S.A.)

tion (NASA) to record space activities at the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Alabama and at Cape Kennedy, Florida. I began at Huntsville and then travelled with a Saturn booster from Huntsville to Cape Kennedy. During the trip of two weeks, I made thirty to forty drawings a day as we travelled due North through the Tennessee Valley Authority complex of lakes and locks to the Ohio River. At the city of Cairo, we joined the Mississippi and continued down it south to New Orleans, east across the Gulf of Mexico, round the Florida Keys to Cape Canaveral, as the Cape was then still called.

The composition of the mural 'Man and Space' (Fig. 3) is based on the landscape around Cape Kennedy, to me the most moving and exciting one I have ever tried to paint. The lines of gantries, the launching pads, each built for a particular rocket, stand stark and orange against the blue Florida sky, as though growing out of the native wild tangle of scrub and dune. I included in the mural the Indian remains discovered on Merritt Island when the Space Center was under construction, the flat domes of the burial mounds echoing strangely and un- mistakably the shape of the concrete domes of the mission control blockhouses above the scrub growth at a safe distance from each pad. But beyond the technology theme of the work is my feeling of the dehumanizing of man by machine. The astronaut, a hero in the early days of space exploration, it appeared to me, had degenerated into his being merely an extension and servant of his capsule. The tragedy on Pad 37, when three astronauts met death in a flash fire, sadly bears out my feeling. A count- down for a space launch is programmed; it is automatic. It is only when something goes wrong that a warning light flashes. The machine tells man something must be done and then man intervenes. Perhaps my feeling of the astronauts being servants of their capsule is exaggerated. The driver of an automobile or the rider of a horse is not in too dissimilar a position, except that there are fewer or no warnings of danger in these cases.

When I was at Cape Kennedy, constantly in my mind was the idea of the artist as interpreter and recorder of his age and times. Daumier wrote that the camera records visual facts. Not a move is made in the space effort without the winking camera eye

Fig. 5. 'Computer Room', water-colour and ink on paper, 9 x 12 in, 1968. Sketch for water-colour mural

'Man and Computer' (cf. colour plate II).

Fig. 6. 'Testing Micro-boards', water-colour and ink on paper, 9 x 12 in, 1968. Sketch for water-colour mural

'Man and Computer' (cf. colour plate II).

Fig. 7. 'Circuit Boards', water-colour and ink on paper, 9 x 12 in, 1968. Sketch for water-colour mural 'Man

and Computer' (cf. colour plate II).

recording successes and failures. Undoubtedly, the artistic photographer can do more than record facts. I believe when people, say two hundred years from now, want to know what it was like to watch a launch in the early days of space exploration, they will turn, not to factual or artistic photographs but

201



Theodore Hancock

to drawings and paintings [3-6]. The role of the plastic fine arts to record events has been in low repute for too many years to my way of thinking. Here we are moving rapidly into the fantastic new environment of outer space and do we have an adequate legacy of our living with it? We go to museums to obtain a deeper understanding of how men in bygone ages have lived and solved the problems of their relationship to the environment and of their beliefs. It is in this context that I am committed to making paintings.

IV. The fourth water-colour mural I will discuss,

'Man and Computer' (Fig. 4, cf. color plate II), was commissioned by Bazil Z. de Ferranti for Inter- national Computers, Ltd. (I.C.L.). Much has been written on the construction of computers and on their use in mathematics, science and business administration. Artists in several countries are studying the possibility of using the computer as a tool for producing art [7-10]. For this mural, I carried on the artist's role of recording and inter-

preting the visual experiences and human aspects of computer operation.

Three of a large series of drawings I made for the mural at computer installations in Putney and Stevenage, England, are shown in Figs. 5, 6, and 7. The drawing in Fig. 6 is a combination of figurative and non-figurative elements and the one in Fig. 7 would be classified as an abstract drawing by a viewer unfamiliar with computer circuit boards. The theme of the complete mural is the partnership between man and the computer.

Surely, technology is one of the central problems of our times. Either we control the incredible complexity and power of modern inventions for social good or we become their slaves. The need to humanize life amid our technocracy and to restate human values is an overwhelming one and must be done before it is too late. The artist can do his share whether he concerns himself with the new landscapes provided by the explorations of the very large and very small aspects of the universal or with the changing environment under the impact of tech- nological developments.

REFERENCES

1. G. Kepes, The New Landscape (Chicago: P. Theo- bald, 1956).

2. F. J. Malina, Some Reflections on the Difference between Science and Art, Directions in Art, Theory and Aesthetics in A. Hill, ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1968).

3. Personal profile: Chesley Bonestell, Space Artist, Spaceflight 11, 82 (1969).

4. D. A. Hardy, The Role of the Artist in Astro- nautics, Spaceflight 12, 14 (1970).

5. F. J. Malina, On the Visual Fine Arts in the Space Age, Leonardo 3, 323 (1970).

6. R. J. Turner, Extraterrestrial Landscapes through the Eyes of a Sculptor, Leonardo 5, 11 (1972).

7. R. I. Land, Computer Art: Color-stereo Displays, Leonardo 2, 335 (1969).

8. Z. Sykora and J. Blazek, Computer-aided Multi- element Geometrical Abstract Paintings, Leonardo 3, 409 (1970).

9. K. Nash and R. H. Williams, Computer Program for Artists: ART 1, Leonardo 3, 439 (1970).

10. H. W. Franke, Computers and Visual Art, Leonardo 4, 331 (1971).

Aquarelles murales sur la technologie

Resume-L'auteur raconte comment il a ete amene a choisir des themes fondes sur l'aspect de la ville de New York, ou sur des paysages et des scenes marques par la technologie, depuis les raffineries de

petrole jusqu'aux fusees spatiales et aux ordina- teurs. I1 explique les raisons pour lesquelles il prefere l'aquarelle et decrit en detail sa methode pour peindre 'a l'aquarelle 'a une echelle murale.

202



Plate II-Top, left: Theodore Hancock, 'Man and Computer', water-colour and ink, rag paper on Masonite, 6 x 8 ft, 1968. Commissioned by Bazil Z. de Ferranti of International Computers, Ltd. and installed on their premises at Putney, London, England. (Fig. 4, cf. page 202.) Center: Ana Sacerdote de Guthmann, 'Suggestion of Complementarity', gouache on paper, 32 x 31 cm, 1965. A part of the animated cinema film 'Ensaio de c6r animada'. (Fig. 2, cf.

page 240.) Top, right: Robert C. Bassler, Scene from the 16 mm cinema film 'Variations, 1971'. (Collec- tions of The Arts Council of Great Britain and Mr and Mrs W. Smith, Los Angeles, California

U.S.A.) (Fig. 8, cf. page 194.)



U.S.A.) (Fig. 8, cf. page 194.)



U.S.A.) (Fig. 8, cf. page 194.)



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Water-Colour Murals of Technology