Talk about ‘enemies of promise’.
Talk about ‘enemies of promise’. In the March 1942 number of Horizon magazine there appeared what could be a heartfelt illustration of the whinger’s conceit propagated by Horizon’s editor, Cyril Connolly, to the effect that life stifles artistic ambitions. Plate 2, ‘Dreamer in Landscape’ by John Craxton, is a pen-and-wash drawing of horny plants breathing down the neck of a dozing boy. How very Craxton. Not yet 20 and already well-versed in overgrown styling and poetic self-pity.
For decades Craxton lived with the fact that early promise guarantees nothing. What in his salad days denoted a growing confidence — the tidied airs, the recurrence of good-looking lads in neatly facetted littorals — became as pigeonholed as Tintin graphics. Greece brought this on; for there, post war, in the late Forties, he found his land of promise: bright, clear cut, a hedonic mosaic of favourite things with which to fill pictures.
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