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Salient. Victoria University students' Newspaper. Volume Number 39, Issue 7. April 12 [1976]

Salient Reviewer Takes the Offensive

Salient Reviewer Takes the Offensive

Sir,

Lindy Allen Dip. F.A.'s left buttock may well be as knowledgeable about art as I am, in which case she would have been welt advised to employ it instead of the feeble organ she did to write her silly and inaccurate letter attacking my review in the issue of March-22.

She argues that because my name is unknown to her 'as a member of the artistic profession' whatever that might be that I am unqualified to write about Art (her capital not mine), whatever that is. This is utter drivel.

Her main criticism of my review is 'the fact that little real information was given in it on the paintings themselves'. She also finds my statement 'firmly establishes him as a major talent in the local context' a reference to Robert McLeod's painting 'The Long Way Home', 'inane'. Of this painting I wrote:

Of the three painters showing at Elva Belt's. Robert McLeod is the most mature. I have written elsewhere of McLeod's exuberant colour and paint handling, and of his stylistic affinities with the Scotsman Alan Davey and the sixties school of British painters. McLeod is also a Scotsman, and has been criticised for failing to come to terms with his new environment. Ignoring this criticism, and well aware of the stulifying effect 'the New Zealand thing' has had on many painters and of its modishness, Robert McLeod has continued to throw brilliant colour on his canvases with gay abandon. Up until now that is.

The very large work hung here, 'The Long Way Home', represents a real breakthrough for McLeod and should silence his critics. Gone are the selfconsciously childlike Alan Davey devices and the joyous colours. Instead the colours are muted landscape tones, ochre, grey and green, almost from Woolston's palette. The composition is tight and altogether successful, no mean achievement in a work on this scale and the paint-handling is fluent.

Till now Robert McLeod has been a painter to watch. 'The Long Way Home' is his first recognisable New Zealand statement and firmly establishes him as a major talent in the local context.

What kind of 'real information' does Lindy Allen Dip. F.A. require? I'm at a loss to understand the reason for her invective. If she had read a my review properly or bothered to get off her knowledgeable buttocks to look at this exhibition, which she patently has not done, or indeed if she were aware of Robert McLeod's work, which equally patently she is not, she, or her buttock might have understood what I meant. The inanity is her own.

Of course there is an 'absence of technical terms' in my review (I intended there to be) but hardly 'a complete absence'. The use of specialist terminology and painterly jargon is anathema in a paper of this nature.

Her final statement 'I write this in defence of my profession, and not to promote my own interests' really takes the biscuit for pretentiousness.

If indeed Lindy Allen Dip. F.A. you are concerned about the standard of reviewing in Salient, as I am, I suggest you write a few reviews yourself. I would warn you however, that whatever you write you will be abused by nuts and self-appointed experts with God knows what kind of dubious personal axes to grind.

Yours etc,

Neil Rowe.