Notes

Referencing Pinker's training in early and mid-century European modernism, Landscape for a Lost Child constitutes a portent 'map' for finding oneself again. It contains subtle references to many of the -isms to which he was introduced as an art student in England and in the South of France in the 1950s and 60s, ranging from Dadaism and Surrealism to such modernist movements as Cubism, Futurism and even Geometrical Abstraction. Most intriguing is the unusual use of stencilled letters in this work. Hidden among a range of abstract shapes are the letters which spell out the sentence: "I love u", a prototypical form of primitive language. "The language of modernism in painting" Hayden Proud argues, "of dealing intelligently with such concerns as the integrity of the picture plane, shallow pictorial space, open compositional modes and the notion of colour and texture as primary, independently expressive elements was poorly understood in South Africa". Pinker took it upon himself, in such works as Landscape for Lost Child, to learn a new language and to make a noise about it creating what Proud calls "a peculiarly Pinkeresque pictorial noise and clutter, a Dadist circus orchestrated by the artist."¹

1. Michael Stevenson. (2004) Stanley Pinker. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson Publishing. Foreword by Hayden Proud. Page 9.