29Sep
A lifelong friendship with Maurice Owen
There were several important friendships that I formed at Portsmouth College of Art in the 1963-1967 period on my Diploma in Art & Design Foundation and undergrad course. I’ve talked about my early experiences with Martin Harford, Gary Crossley, Pete Harris, John Czaky and George Hardie elsewhere, but Maurice Owen was also special - and different in that he pursued his career as a research artist for his whole lifetime, like myself, but also because he remained focussed on a singular form: sculpture, most of the time. I say most, because I was drawn to him at first because he produced a play - a setting of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi ( written in 1896, when Jarry was 23). And this was brilliant. And thanks for introducing me to Jarry - a unique contribution to the fin de siecle cultural landscape. But wait, Maurice was in the Sculpture studios, and I must note his work on perspective reconstructions he derived brilliantly from De Chirico’s painting The Great Metaphysician (Il Grande Matafisico of 1917) 3D constructions derived from de Chirico’s flat painting, reconstructions based upon whether the set-square in the painting was 45/90 degrees, or 60/30 degrees.
Let alone drawing our collective attention on De Chirico himself - his dreamlike, chimerical, townscapes hinting of Surrealism... It was Maurice’s clever fusion of art-research, aesthetic investigation, creativity and technological approach in this piece that determined why the Pompidou Centre in Paris purchased it for their permanent collection.But the friendship went much further - Maurice introduced me to avant-garde (free-form) modern jazz - he’s a good jazz-saxophonist - so this came from the horses mouth to someone who is musically illiterate - and it was Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and other Free Jazz afficionados, - and I hadn’t heard much of this back then - it was a revelation. At that time (1980s I guess) Maurice had a big airey Georgian-style flat on Hayling Island, in a large and famous Crescent overlooking the common, and we sat and listened - Maurice had just returned from Japan, where he had studied Zen Archery - have you read Eugen Herrigel’s Zen and the Art of Archery (1948) ? - it’s just great, as is Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that my mate the late Tim Mills introduced me to in the 1990s - this while servicing his own Vincent Black-Shadow in his flat near Rathbone Place. So Maurice introduced me to Japanese cooking, Zen Archery, Free Jazz, his delightful girl-friend Maggie - and to Gales corkers - their local Petersfield bottled ale that came in a corked beer bottle..
But back to Maurice Owen and his imaginative recreation of Il Grande Metafisico in 3d.
The creation of a three-dimensional construction from a flat, two dimensional painting was a task that required Maurice to have some datum from which he could work - and in some versions of Il Grande Metafisico, de Chirico had included a geometer's right-angle triangle - the point that these exist in two main forms - 90/45 degrees and 90/60/30 degrees - is why he decided to make two three-dimensional constructions.
(https://www.owen-artresearch.uk/custom/artresearch/dechirico/artresearch/artresearch.html)
Comments