Page 42 - Studio International - December 1967

I got associated with the Betty Parsons Gallery, and my I was at one point trying to introduce myself as an anti-
work got into a kind of all-over painting then. I guess it anti-artist or as a non-non-painter, which was a little
was abstract-impressionist more than expressionist. In '50 more accurate than anything else—or as an abstract or
I got rid of that, and around '50 I separated the calli- most abstract and least expressionist painter. There are a
graphy or the brush stroke into a kind of black and white lot of derogatory words that were applied to abstract
composition and I separated that from colour, which painters in the Thirties—like formalist, escapist, sterile,
became brick walls, large strokes of bright colour that inhuman, cold, unemotional, empty, dogmatic, absolute,
jumped. I suppose it might have something to do with academic, purist. I decided that those words were not
the optic painting that is around. But I got rid of that, bad. In fact they were better than any other words. So I
though, by before '55. In '53 I was working all black, and have been calling whatever I liked 'dogma', and I
the shapes were those long panels that looked Chinese or certainly take an absolutist and a dogmatist-negativist
Japanese. I got rid of that shape by 1960. Since 1960 I've and academic-formalist position, and in its most extreme
been working with this square. way. I've participated recently in a number of religious