Page 44 - Studio International - September 1966

sees the tangible perspective in perspective. Once you
have an image, as Magritte has in the whole apparatus of
realism, you can turn its attention to itself. This I did,
with the intention of making an obtrusive space, a
tangible space. This was not a way of describing space,
but of contradicting space.
Then the object spawned its own object, another ghostly
object, as the mind struggles to assert normality, for the
room began to act as an interior space again. It became
an optical painting. One saw space where no space was.
When someone asked why the door didn't open, a friend
suggested the reply: To open the door you must first cross
the floor. Of course one must see the construction before
one appreciates fully its felicities. For instance, when lit
from the left it appears to be lit from the right, and when
one moves from left to right looking at it, one moves in
the other suggested room from right to left. On diagram-
matic examination the reasons are obvious.
I have made paintings of, and most of the painting con-
sists solely of: ticks, crosses, flags, cats, mats, mice, bees,
roses, girls, bacon and egg, legs with boots on, clowns,
wallpaper, cloakroom tickets, rooms, gaps, family trees,
jigsaw puzzles, telescopes, footprints, maps, liquorice all-
sorts, pegs on lines, Kandinskys and a Mondrian, bread
on plates, jigsaws, Desperate Dan, tits, oculists charts,
envelopes, mirrors, logs of wood, gaps, keyholes, chemistry
stencils, chairs, masks, fences, rainbows, bottles, houses,
rulers, shoes, pastry, and postboxes. It seems I need to be
a figurative painter. q

Patrick Procktor
6 a.m. Southill Park is an imaginary scene. I have never
been to Southill Park from which the room in the-painting
is taken. Neither have I had a leather jacket ever. The
painting is theatrical. In what sense?
It is the set at the end of a play or the beginning of
another. There are no characters. Like a play it has a real
present and an implied past and future. The past is the
stains, the guest who left his jacket, the doors which were
closed and are now open, whoever painted the enormous
mural and even for what reason. The present is the morn-
ing, the future outside the window. This is the time
element in the finished picture. There is also the sequence
of past, present, and future in the development of the
painting, which is not the same. So a writer may write
the last scene first.
In Lowell Nesbitt's Boston staircase there are certain
aspects which are not imaginary: the chameleon-like
beauty of the painting which in a photograph seems to
resemble a photograph, also its formal self-sufficiency
without incident. One positively does not expect Agnes
Moorehead to come clambering down the staircase, nor
the Nanny up. But the power of the painting is over the

Patrick Procktor
Top
Leather Boy in a Field 1965
Cryla on canvas
16 x 12 in.

Left
6 a.m. Southill Park 1965
Cryla on canvas
58 x 74 in.
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