Free My Time in Space by Tim Robinson

birdsong or cathedral arches, or stands reverentially gazing from an architectural ope onto multiple views of moons breaking through clouds or setting on sea horizons. These almost allegorical scenes suffer on an old dilemma that has embarrassed better artists than me, of whether Mankind, the Child, the Soul, should be nude, or draped in timelessly indeterminate robes.
    Perhaps in these evidences of painful conflict between my longing for sensuous and intelligent breadth to life, and the frustrations of shy and inhibited adolescence in a torpid country town, I can see, if not the very origin, then the first apparition of a dualism that has riven almost all my creativity. In the abstract paintings I misspent so much effort on in Cambridge – most of them unexhibitable even to myself and long since destroyed, the rest shortly to follow them – there is an interplay between a gridwork of horizontal and vertical divisions that seems to derive from the earlier bars and railings, though it is more supportive than oppressive, and freeform motifs that vary from the ecstatic intertwining and soaring of flame or bird-flight, through a Beardsleyesque swordplay elegance, to the stressful jaggedness of Herbert Read’s ‘geometry of fear’. A dialectic of reason and emotion animates all art, and it would be simplistic to locate it in the opposition between the rectilinear and the irregular; there is nothing rational about the right-angle per se, and while Mondrian’s supremely instinctual balancesbreathe rationality, paintings constructed according to algorithms often smell of laborious dottiness. However, two principles of organization are at work in these Cambridge paintings: a flow of energy, muscular or nervous, and a stasis, of stability or rigidity. I shall keep just one of them; its vortices of interlacing espaliered on Cartesian co-ordinates look forward to my much more recent concern with the contrasted geometries of the Celtic and classical worlds.
    It was not remarkable that in Vienna, having for the first time organized my life to privilege the hours of painting, I should at first find myself unable to paint. Eventually I broke out of a period of paralysis by, almost arbitrarily, sketching some free versions of an engraving by Vesalius – one of his shocking visions of the human frame stripped of clothes and skin. From these grim anatomies sprang a race of monsters, gaunt gesticulating lop-limbed spider-dinosaurs with empty skulls. Unleashed upon the city of Freud, the exorbitantly phallic and castrated things ( sprouting phalluses as the Hydra sprouted heads) fell upon their inevitable interpretations as upon swords; nevertheless I think they had non-personal connotations, in that time of impending warfare between ‘Neanderthals with atomic weapons’, as a Viennese friend of ours put it, and at that place where human creatures had bayonetted and flung grenades at each other on our very doorstep little more than a decade earlier. Horrible as they are, some of these figures could be worth preserving. They were rapidly sketched on big sheets of cartridge paper, in triangular brush-strokes of black ink that give them a texture of bark; in fact if they seem about to fall on one like trees, they are not ancient, gnarled and blasted oaks but light, wind-thinned upland birches or bare wintry rowans. Behind their menace they are fragile creatures thatremind me as I write of a praying mantis that came once to pose, rigid as a spun-glass ornament, in the lamplight on my pillow in Turkey. In these characteristics they showed some saving affinity with the lyrical sequence of both tree-like and bird-like feminine figures, Winged Victories in fact, which were painted at about the same time.
    My murderous male hominids soon acquired habitats to prowl in: claustrophobic tunnels and cellars and slits that might have been between hammer and anvil or the jaws of a screw-vise. Later the pathetic creatures skulked in the crevices and drains