Laurence Simmons on Pat Hanly ‘Pacific Escape’

Laurence Simmons on Pat Hanly ‘Pacific Escape’

Featured in Important Paintings & Contemporary Art | Tuesday 15 August 2023

“All good art is political,” American novelist Toni Morrison once declared. Morrison continued, “And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo’.” Pat Hanly gave Morrison’s polemic substance and sting when in the mid-1980s he produced a series of works, The Fire This Time, related to New Zealand’s advocacy of a nuclear- free stance.

In 1984, Prime Minister David Lange banned nuclear- powered or nuclear-armed ships from using New Zealand ports or entering New Zealand waters. Three years later under the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987, territorial sea, land and airspace of New Zealand became nuclear- free zones. His protest paintings made Hanly both an aesthetic and ethical hero, the colours and forms come and go across their range but the intuitions of
his message are constant. Hanly not only painted his protest he was a vociferous supporter of the Peace Squadron, the flotilla of small craft from surfboards to yachts (including Hanly’s trailer-sailer) and motor boats that did its best to block the visits of American nuclear- armed vessels to our harbours. Hanly was also active in the Peace Movement for many years, including as a founding member of VAANA (Visual Artists Against Nuclear Arms).

For Hanly the backstory of painting in protest about nuclear issues began in London in the early 1960s when he and his wife Gil, confronted with the insidious effects of the Cold War and the growing threat of nuclear war, joined the marches for nuclear disarmament. In direct response Hanly was to produce his first series of twenty paintings, Fire on Earth, three of which were exhibited in Soho’s Gallery One, a new exhibition space for emerging artists with radical ideas. The series then included titles like Escape from Destruction (1960), Fire above the City (1960) and Escape Vessel (1960).

In the mid-1980s, now firmly ensconced in New Zealand and responding again to the threat of nuclear testing and prosed visits from nuclear-armed ships, he returned to their formats, not least for the like messages embedded in his surfaces. The many-sailed ‘escape’ vessel, brown and ochre landforms, jagged outlines of Pacific Escape (1984) are also to be found in various forms in the earlier works of 1960. For Hanly, the sailboat is not only a vehicle of protest but, as the painting’s title suggests, a means to freedom and escape, an intimation of new nuclear-free horizons sought. And in both series of paintings, despite the indications of apocalypse, there is a serenity of rhythmic composition balanced with chromatic links of vibrant colour. The jostle of mismatched marks, jagged lines and textures enable an exhilarating sense of participation, as if viewing stroke by stroke. The subtle contrasts of warm and cool hues, pushing and pulling at the viewer’s gaze.

The enigmatic phrase “the sensual twisting of a lost symbol” Hanly inscribed on the verso of Escape from Destruction might be read as an emblematic description of his later paintings too. Whereas the early works seem to float and shimmer, these from the mid-80s, in part because of their rich, pure tonalities, leap out at one—colours and shapes acting like the loud bits of a symphony. The bright, saturated colours of Pacific Escape in mostly abstract shapes—dots, bars, zigzag lines, circles, organic curves—make direct semiotic reference to the outside world: the flag, the iconic Pacific palm and New Zealand kauri, the white-sailed vessel, the flame-red sea. Individually, colours and forms seem to move into space, forming signs that coalesce and dissolve into pure pattern as they are studied.

It is still-life that seems to be Hanly’s lurking, fundamental genre. His signs are objects. He arranges them. Everything, including snatches of abstract design or facture, feels imported from somewhere
and put in place, where it stays. A farrago of symbols jammed together as if their shelf of life were about to expire. Hanly tends to use oils as if they were poster paints, flatly—often scumbling, rather than glazing or blending, to modulate tones and colours. The result is a surreptitious richness energised by creative entropy. He ensures the rhetorical potency of oil—its sensuous texture, light-drinking colour, infinite suggestiveness— strains at a short, tense leash.

This means his composition is taut with the urgency of serious breaking news. A year after Hanly’s painting, New Zealand prime minister David Lange gave the world that news, arguing successfully at the Oxford Union the proposition that “nuclear weapons are morally indefensible.”

Laurence Simmons