Page 44 - Studio International - November 1967

the present convention in colour painting has given to
artists is invaluable because it has made them come to
grips with—to my mind—the most essential considera-
tion in painting, colour itself. And it has moved off whole-
heartedly and effectively from cubist vision.
I have a more profligate and baroque intention in my
painting: I am not discarding any of the elements of
painting, nor do I wish to reduce them. I want to use the
whole range of artistic means and language, not to destroy
or deny the twentieth-century conventions, but to enrich
and enlarge colour experience.

Is there any indication in the general scene that painting
is beginning to move in the direction you have indicated ?
Yes. I have seen many instances in which painters in-
volved with system have moved off to use a greater variety
of surface densities. Some are so bold as to abandon the
close value method of unifying paintings.
Olitiski is, of course, a conspicuous example of the
baroque approach I mentioned a while ago; but there
must by now be many young painters of yet-unestablished
reputation who are swinging or beginning to swing in
this direction. They are extremely lucky to have grown
up surrounded by the great profusion of colour painting
that has evolved since the mid-1950s.

You yourself developed in the 1950s. What artistic in-
fluences were most important to you early on ?
All my early training was cubist-oriented. My first
modern enthusiasm was Picasso, a bit later Mire). My
abiding European admiration is Matisse. I also like
Monet and scores of earlier painters—for instance, Piero
della Francesca and Rembrandt. I see in the painters I
have mentioned and in other masters technical concerns
which are pertinent even today and traditions which are
still developable.
I haven't mentioned any of the Americans. They, too,
are germane. Pollock's results were of considerable inter-
est to me, though I had no impulse to follow his method.
In the next generation, it was Morris Louis who moved
me. It was not only his innovations, but the spirit of his
work I was drawn to.
The cubist vision of my education proved uncomfort-
able. Its rigid spatial method was difficult for me to take
and interested me less and less. The early statements of
analytical Cubism are still, to my mind, the greatest cub-
ist statements. My sympathy and curiosity went increas-
ingly toward colour primacy. The great analytical
paintings I have been talking about were certainly not in
that direction. Later Cubism used colour that would end
as decoration and that seemed unwholesome to me. I
really begged the question for a number of years and tried
to unify works by linear and calligraphic means; yet all
the while, I was experimenting with varieties of colour
relationships.
Curiously enough, I was relatively unaware of the
Abstract Expressionists, until rather late in their develop-
ment — I have in mind the so-called second generation.
I had no interest in sheerly expressive means.
I finished school in 1950; I'd been studying painting at
the University of Florida. The next ten years or so were
spent in defining my problems. Though I lived and