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Sam Cairncross After A Year

E.-C. Simpson

Before he left for France some eighteen months ago Sam had already reached a measure of local fame, not as a painter, but as an event with a popular amusement interest worth a few paragraphs in the paper like a stranded whale or a two-headed calf. Our reverence for mediocrity and respectable conformity was shocked into sniggering contempt for a man who permitted his fiery energy to take precedence over those most precious commodities—the certainty of the weekly payday and the privilege of two days a week on which to give free rein to the meaner pleasures of life. Sam's choice in letting go his hold on an accepted social occupation in order to find adequate expression for the urgency of his desire to paint has been a frequent mark of the genius who steps out of the monotonous traffic lane of the ordinary man. To take this step does not itself constitute genius; the motive to do so may arise from many causes much less worthy of interest and encouragement.

Sam's one-man show before his European journey showed us an artist in whom there was every promise. He was incredibly prolific, producing paintings that were often the result of a continuous application night and day until the work was complete and the painter physically and nervously exhausted. Sam never has had any conception of painting as a pleasurable manual relaxation during which the mind and body recuperate agreeably from the strain of weekly living. Unlike so many New Zealand artists whose paintings are a rejection and negation of the consuming intensity of the sensation of living, Sam has painted with an energy and a delight in the expenditure of force and effort that is the peculiar property of those who live fully and enjoy it.

His earlier paintings were often as raw as an unripe fruit, showing an uncontrolled urgency in the use of violent colour, writhing line and paint slashed on with handsome prodigality; behind them and concealed by his search for a means of expression that should be a fitting symbol for his

(Continued on p. 16)

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