Treasure Tom Scott and his genius
Mentioned in despatches: We so rarely allow ourselves time to read print with care. Neither do we take time to pore over visual images and interact with the content. In fact, most of us have lost the ability to read the visuals with any depth, just as we no longer expect to have to work at the words we read. In an interesting coincidence, the same week I was given a copy of David Henshaw’s book Jock’s Country, Tom Scott published one of the most terrifying cartoons I have seen since Picasso’s Guernica, and two women opened an exhibition of beautiful, and entirely abstract, paintings. Their reviews make up this week’s reflections, and their work thoroughly deserves more than a moment’s conversation.
‘‘Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us. – Robert Burns’ To a Louse
Review:
What: Jock’s Country: The Cartoons and Paintings of David Henshaw
Who: Published in 2018 by David Bateman Ltd.
Who’s this feller Jock, then? Turns out that he is a fiction, but more real than the living characters we come across.
Most of us are pretty forgettable, but occasionally someone comes along who tells us about our life and times with such clarity, such gusto, such sheer pleasure, that that we all end up feeling pretty good about ourselves.
Well, Jock tells the stories, but the man behind this chronicler of New Zealand society for nearly four decades is David Henshaw, born in Kimbolton, and travelling in much of New Zealand before having the good sense to ‘‘retire’’ in the Waikato.
In the same way as Ida Carey was just around the corner in Hamilton East, he lived down the road in Tamahere.
Many of you will know him personally. Many more will know him through his extraordinarily witty, lucidly perceptive, creatively unique cartoons.
You may not know that he was at school in Palmerston North with Tom Scott and Murray Ball.
It is coincidentally fitting that today’s three reviews deal with the visual arts, and that Tom Scott’s entry, focusing on a single cartoon, is one of those three.
Henshaw’s collection of line drawings and watercolours restores our faith in farmers and offers insights into their practices which are an interesting reflection upon today’s dollar driven management.
Review
What: Tom Scott’s Free Speech cartoon
When: The Waikato Times, Tuesday, August 14, 2018, p.12
We look at the regular cartoon entries in the Waikato Times, chuckle, or go ‘‘Mmmm …’’ or ‘‘ Clever …’’ or ‘‘What was that about?’’ and turn to sport, unmoved, unchanged.
In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451, there is the comment: ‘‘I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths …’’ because people no longer wanted to read disturbing words which ‘‘show the pores in the face of life …’’ Instead, the papers were filled with wordless visual images – cartoons.
How prophetic. Universal editorial policy today is to salt prose with graphics, pictures, to make reading less arduous. Cartoons, however, can be wonderfully, informatively, revealing.
Sometimes, their focused precis of ideas is the only way of getting people to consider societychanging issues. In Scott’s utterly disturbing cartoon of August 14, he manipulates two horizontal archival photographs.
The top image has a rally rousing Adolf Hitler calling for Jews to be exterminated.
Drops of blood falling from a Nazi banner carry the eye down to the killing halls of a concentration camp.
The red backing for the swastika has dissolved into drops of blood raining down on a snowcovered foreground through which railway lines draw the eye to the gray building in which people will die.
Ironically, in the centre of the image, is a tiny Christian cross.
The accompanying text simply says: ‘‘Sometimes free speech comes at a … terrible price.’’
In a few square centimetres, Scott encapsulates the problems of the free-speech debate.
The logic is inescapable. His genius is a mastery of the powerful image.
Treasure him. Appreciate his perception.
Give his vision your attention and his insights your time.
Review
What: Two Redheads and a Paintbrush
Who: Tanya Cook and Djuanne Rusden
When: Friday, August 24
Where: Frankton Art Gallery
Abstract art can be a little, or a lot, like music. It excites the emotions, energises the intellect, and has no references in the real world except for remarkable aesthetic pleasure via the power of the imagination. Humans want to know what things are, what they mean. When most of us looked at the 40 or so paintings in this unusual exhibition, there was a consensus. They were unusually beautiful, remarkable in their striking colour, technically polished, and imaginatively conceived, but most of us still needed to find references to the world we inhabit. Only after we discovered hillsides, or moving water, and felt better for it, could we entertain the fact that the real joy, the inherent delight in this exhibition came from the vivid use of colour, and the freedom of form encompassed by colour variation. The consequent emotional impact of that freedom to explore resulted in that same exhilarating pleasure we get from music. Here is ‘‘Colour so rich you can almost taste it …’’ to quote artist Rusden, and ‘‘I love the emotion of abstract art …’’ said Cook. They knew. New ways of looking increase the value of the old ways, so that when we gazed at the intense hues in Rusden’s shining, blue/green, resin-finished Lagoon, we looked upwards through the water. Light changed. The world was different, and we were refreshed.
It was not water. It was the sense of water, the essence of refracted light, and it was beautiful. For pics of the world, use a camera. To respond to the world, get a paintbrush.
Events next week:
Friday, August 31, 7pm, Gallagher Centre: Bill Stoneham conducts a performance by Waikato Diocesan School for Girls’ Bel Suono Choir and the Waikato Schools Symphonic Band.
Saturday, September 1, Gaslight Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge Rep’s Domestic Bliss, a fascinating fantasy about three women who share the same kitchen – albeit in different generations.
Sunday, September 2, 7.30pm, The Meteor Theatre: Julia Deans in her We Light Fires Album Release Tour. In this commemorative year of women’s suffrage, ‘‘a light has been shone on the gender disparity conversation’’ and this tour focuses on that light as well as being engagingly entertaining.