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Sport 21: Spring 1998

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If, in previous centuries, the sailboat or oceangoing vessel was a symbol of the voyage, in the 20th century the aeroplane has usurped that role. As well as the aircraft that pepper Hayman's skies, depictions of yachts and fishing boats—influenced by the Cornish naive painter Alfred Wallis—trawl or cruise on through a great many of his paintings and drawings.

In the best Freudian manner, Hayman's sea-paintings often include a female figure—eroticised, totemic—whereas the aeroplanes are unabashedly male symbols. Reiterating the Duchampian analogy between machines and the male sex (see Duchamp's Bride Stripped page 28 Bare By Her Bachelors, Even), the intrusive presence in Hayman's Woman frightened by a flying machine is unmistakably sexual in nature. Hayman's aeroplanes are crazed, mechanistic spermatozoa—intruders into a psychosexual landscape of bulbous forms and stalklike tree trunks. His painted sculpture The Indian Flier (1980) is another such Jungian/Freudian construction, a truncated, winged totem; a delicious (obscene from some angles) insect-aviator.

Black and white image of painting

Patrick Hayman, Woman frightened by a flying machine (1976)