Ian Hamilton Finlay and Jim Nicholson
Homage to Modern Art, 1972
Screenprint (49/70)
Scottish Art Council Collection Bequest, 1998
Ian Hamilton Finlay is a poet who sometimes collaborates with artists to make his artworks. In the 1950s and early 1960s he was involved in what is called 'Concrete Poetry'. This uses the page (or poster print) as a field on which words can be distributed in visual units. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Finlay used sea and fishing boat imagery. In this picture the reference is to Minimalism in modern art, with the sharply abstract image of the triangle placed on the more fluid and natural triangles of the sail.