Draft:Charles Samson Higgins
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Charles Samson Higgins (1893-1980) was an artist and writer who painted under the pseudonym 'Pic', and wrote under 'Ian Dall'. His style of art was characterised as fantastical and faux-naive, evoking dreams and memories in a manner that was at once mysterious and humorous.
Childhood
Higgins was born in Argentina to Scottish parents. His book 'Sun before Seven' gives an insight into the lifestyle the family lived in South America, and the relationships he had with his parents, his sister and his Nanny.
Career
The family returned to the UK during his childhood, and Higgins trained as an engineer. He fought in Gallipoli in the First World War, and was wounded on 15 August 1915. This experience would inspire his written piece 'Sulva Moon'.
Shortly after the War, Higgins began writing and producing collections of poetry, including 'Noah's Wife' in 1925 (Blackwell; Oxford), and in 1936 'Sun Before Seven' which had an introduction by Walter de la Mare (Thomas Nelson & Sons; London).
Higgins began painting in 1928, following the influence of his wife, the portrait painter Kate Olver.
His work was soon exhibited at the celebrated Wertheim Gallery, London, run by Lucy Wertheim, in 1933. Wertheim was a supported of Modern Art, promoting the careers of Christopher Wood and Frances Hodgkins, and providing a space for younger artists and those outside the formal academic system. The brightly coloured, anecdotal style of Higgins' early work was well in keeping with other artists exhibited by the Gallery, such as Kenneth Hall, Henry Stockley and Kathleen Walne.
From the 1940s, Higgins' work became darker and more fantastical, placing figures based on memory, myth and history, in empty abstracted landscapes. These images have th effect of scenes half-remembered and Pic utilised painterly and surrealist techniques such as mono-printing and decalcomania to create these dream-like realms. Many works from the 1940s were painted on found pieces of wood, the artists working with the forms and knots of the material to create images. Titles were anecdotal and elliptical, often short phrases or pieces of dialogue. In his later career the artist would create hundreds of 'minutiae', tiny works on found paper or even metal razor boxes, small in scale but with the same completeness of vision.
During the 1940s, Pic exhibited with artist and writer Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery, London. Later in the decade and in the 1950s, he had solo shows with Gimpel Fils Gallery, London; with Piotr Poworowski in 1954, Georges Braque in 1955 and Austin Cooper in 1959. He also exhibited as part of group shows with Arthur Jeffress Gallery. His 1947 show with Gimpel Fils included a catalogue essay by Maurice Collis. According to the artist's obituary in The Times, the collector Alphonse Kane, who lived in England from 1938 until his death, declared Pic as his choice amongst British painters.
Works by Pic are in the collection of Leicester Museum and Art Gallery.