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Sport 21: Spring 1998

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The summer before I moved to Australia I worked in the research library of the Auckland City Art Gallery, where a painting by the English/New Zealand artist Patrick Hayman (1915-1988) hung just inside the library door. Entitled Atomic Explosion in the Pacific, the picture is a turbulent assemblage of imagined life-forms: above a Gauguinesque nude and a trawler flies the curiously hybridised form of a bird/fish/aeroplane—a flier at once apocalyptic yet warm-spirited page 27 and almost awkward in its trajectory—like an origami swan gone seriously wrong.

The skies in Patrick Hayman's paintings are often inhabited by such strange, enigmatic presences, be they animal, human, mechanical, or all these things at once. In the case of his 1965 painting Self-portrait as a flying machine, the front end of the biplane's fuselage has been replaced with the bearded, spectacled visage of the artist himself. Here we have a different kind of ‘aerial’ view—a vision of the artist as inhabitant of the skies. Beyond nationalistic agendas and the conventions of landscape, portrait, and still life (all earthbound by definition), we have the artist as resident of his own imaginative stratosphere.

Black and white image of painting

Patrick Hayman, Self-portrait as a flying machine (1965)