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SOME TOYS

 

JESSIE SHEELER

 

In the early 1960’s Ian Hamilton Finlay was living in some poverty in Edinburgh. Although as a fifteen year old student, briefly, at the Glasgow School of Art he had been passionately interested in modern art, he came to see himself as a writer, his plays, poems and short stories all characterised by their condensation and evocative imagery.

 

Nevertheless, driven as he was throughout his life to create art working with his hands as well as his mind, he started making lino-and paper-cuts. He continued to write poems, moving away from traditional syntax where words describe images to concrete forms in which word and image coincide. Fascinated by cubist and constructivist sculptures, he started making three dimensional poetic images which could have the same static quality as concrete poems. The existence of a small hardware shop nearby selling paint and plywood for model-makers new ideas came to fruition. A friend living in a large neighbouring New Town flat let him use his hall cupboard as a workshop. It was a roomy cupboard and equipped with electric light and a work surface. With a fretsaw, a selection of Humbrol tinlets, turpentine, glue, brushes, plywood, and dowels, he began to make what he called toys, but toys for the imagination, icons rather than playthings, their simplicity containing manifold associations and meanings.

 

Windmills and water mills recur in Finlay’s work with implications of humour, pathos and affection. The poster poem La Belle Hollandaise illustrates this, showing on a pink background a roughly “painted” cross and the word patch, neatly combining kisses, frustration and the Dutch landscape. A water mill is celebrated in a tender poem included in 1960 collection, The Dancers Inherit the Party:

 

How beautiful, how beautiful the mill

– Wheel is not turning though the waters spill

Their single tress. The whole old mill

Leans to the West, the breast.

 

In 1963, recalling Alphonse Daudet but written from the Edinburgh bedsit, Telegrams from my Windmill was published, a collection of concrete poems, the last of which is kiss-shaped, as windmill’s sails can be. Two years later, having moved north to Ardgay, he began to make large scale concrete poem-objects, such as a large painted wooden garden piece had the words ‘the horizon of Holland is all ears’ fixed to v-shaped struts, imitating the tops of windmill sails on a Dutch horizon, seen by a Scot whose horizon was more likely to feature rabbits’ ears. Boats were a rich source of imagery throughout Finlay’s life. Another early poem would surely have warmed the heart of Robert Louis Stevenson: The Tug

 

Where the fishers wait for bites

Toots the little tug – in tights!

 

Round each river bend and loop

TOOT – like through a circus hoop.

 

The Towns say Tut, that boat’s not black,

It’s far more like a Union Jack!

 

The Steadings never even peep

Because they are all fast asleep!

 

So on an on for hours and hours...

The sky is blue, each bank’s all flowers.

 

And when for Tea the Captain whistles

The crew sit down to spangled rissoles!

 

Finlay’s house at Little Sparta had shelves filled with beautiful little boats made in his workshop, their sails cut from coloured hankies. Janet Boulton’s series of “Boat Window” paintings show larger boats placed on window-sills. In the Roman Garden, recalling the Villa d’Este, warships from World War II are miniaturised — aircraft carriers becoming bird tables and baths. Boulton’s Six Watercolours of the Roman Garden, echoing Finlay’s fondness for the medium, show a restrained delicacy she calls ‘Cezannesque’ while her Paper Relief series reflect another of his penchants, combining, in a way the Cubists would recognise, irregular bands of colour rather like torn paper with strongly linear representations of the ships.

 

In the Dadaist poster poem of 1964, le Circus, a fishing smack is metamorphosed into a bespangled circus pony. A ceramic tile shows what initially looks like a string of islands reminiscent of Japan, but actually represents the world's largest warship, a Japanese vessel destroyed by the Americans in April 1945. The three elements in the tile's text are IJN DJINN YAMATO -— Imperial Japanese Navy; a djinn, or powerful spirit; the name of the warship. The web of references and letter patterns invite meditation on the nature of war. Finlay’s affection for Dada and a tender use of the bizarre lies behind the blue Tower of Umbrellas, a happy balancing act, perhaps a companion piece to his short, French Poem

 

La vie, la vie

Beaucoup de parapluies

and its AUTHORised Translation

Oh life, what a lot of

umbrellas.

 

Finlay’s interest in German Expressionism shows in the colours of some toys, particularly the intriguing string of fish. These fish are the predecessors of much larger ones made at Ardgay, painted a stark orange and strung between the arms of a huge, rusty farm machine. In both cases the paint colours have an emotional charge which highlights the bizarre impact of the image.

 

Finlay’s toys are probably the least known of his works, yet they exemplify crucial characteristics of his work -— the stripping away of detail or exposition; the distillation of ideas which nevertheless holds scope for the imagination. These apparently simple toys offer another avenue to the heart of a consummate and prolific artist’s preoccupations and methods. His affection for the minutiae of life, the breadth of his reading and understanding, his inventive wit, his passionate capacity for work — all underpinned his artistry, that quality so hard to define but easy to recognise. That quality of magic.