Page 43 - Studio International - September 1965

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PHOTOS: ELISABETH DE STROUMILLO
ready worked qualities: they suggest I use the tools
that made them. They are part of the discarded junk of
urban life and through them I want to find relationships
which surprise and excite me, and that project an
image through the terms of classical sculpture-that is,
in terms of space and volume.·
I doubt if he would describe his latest work in this
way-with such emotive phrases as 'the discarded junk
of urban life'-although, of course. it is a development.
indeed an outcome. of this experience. The newer
sculpture is far more economic and controlled; more
constructivist in character, the work of a carpenter
rather than an assembler. He refers to this change
when he says, 'The wood is much more anonymous
than it was at one time. I am no longer involved in the
original use of the wood.' The Cubist. Futurist character
gives recent constructions a classical unity, and also
represents a further withdrawal from imagery. Yet
Startup is far from being a calculating, clinical artist;
indeed one is tempted to call him an ·expressionist'. In
this duality lies his individuality. Cutting up pieces of
wood into rectangular shapes and fitting them together.
itself results in a rigid rectangularity. Yet the gestural
nature of the sculpture springs from a deeper. intuitive,
emotional response. What he terms the 'passive
aspect' of the earlier work, relying on the evocative
nature of objets trouve, has changed to something
more demanding and more belligerent.
'I think the forms are urban, they relate to that kind of
environment, not the shapes in nature. Some have a
figurative relationship, but of a very tenuous kind'.
Startup is a Londoner. born and bred in Fulham; he
enjoys the country as a relaxation. not as something
which illumines and contributes to his experience, or
offers him sensations and images as a creative point
of departure. In this. it is clear. his motivation and aims
are completely different from Barbara Hepworth. or