Open Road

Theo Hancock is a brash, engaging young Briton who invaded the U.S. two years ago with a fellowship to study art at Brown University. Instead of studying, Hancock produced it. Brown saw little of him; the 25-year-old artist hitchhiked about the East, painting watercolors of what he saw and exhibiting them in Boston, Providence and Manhattan. Then he drifted westward, still painting, and exhibited his land-and cityscapes and industrial scenes in Toronto, Buffalo, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco. Last week he opened in Los Angeles.

As usual, the critics were kind. Liking the clear colors, clean shapes and easy sweep of Hancock's water colors, they winked at the abstract whatnots--right angles, arcs and bright balloons--with which he jazzes some of them up. Hancock, like elder Britons Paul Nash, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, divides his allegiance between traditional British landscape painting and abstraction; like them, he cannot bear to forsake either one altogether.

Combining the two in the same frame is rather like trying to combine earth and sky, but Hancock attempts even that.

Horizon lines, he thinks, are apt to divide pictures too harshly. "People are accustomed to seeing the top of a picture have a blue sky which they accept as inevitable. For my part, I repeat the forms and patterns found on the earth in the area generally given over to the sky, or vice versa, to achieve a feeling of oneness."

The notion is not so weird as might appear at first thought; El Greco, for one, carried it out successfully. So far, Hancock has failed to do so. His paintings are uneasy compromises that require sympathy in order to give pleasure. But for himself and for what he is 'trying to do--which includes seeing the world--the lanky, shaggy-haired artist has been finding sympathy all across the continent.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.