Page 33 - Studio International - November 1968

Right, untitled monoprint, 1968, one of
the 200 monoprints all made from three
screens using a different number of
printings. Editions Alecto; below, 5000
squares 1967, emulsion on canvas,
50 x 50 in. Lisson Gallery; bottom,
untitled dot painting 1968, emulsion on
canvas, 50 x 50 in. Lisson Gallery.

before. Two faculties that were part of my make-up could be used to without being able to see which colour I had got. It is not possible
dispose of each other. If the intellect could devise a way of working, to make any choice completely at random, but one can make a
but could not conceive of the final visual outcome, then good taste random choice among any prescribed set of possible choices, in this
could be subverted. One could start a picture not knowing how it case the five available colours.
would look at the end, but one would have a definite path to follow I then devised systems where each colour choice was still made by
to lead one to where one was going. The first system I used was a way chance, but the set of possibilities gradually varied over the surface
of making shapes grow on the canvas using a logical process of of the painting. I made pictures based on programmes which were
gradual enlargement. The shapes consisted of bands of colour, and complicated number tables which showed me what colours were
the colour choices were still made as one went along, and were possible and in what quantities in any part of the painting. I made
therefore subject to the dangers which had now become familiar. pictures which were superimpositions of two or more programmes.
Later, instead of choosing each colour, I found ways of treating Another method of colour gradation was to vary the size of the
colour choices in advance. I remember a painting done on a white units rather than their quantity. In this way I produced prints and
canvas which started with a black dot which grew and reproduced pictures which looked like details of four colour separations, but in
itself, and the colours of the bands were simply a gradual transition fact were the opposite, that is, colour put-togethers.
from black to white. I no longer had to decide when the painting Very occasionally, as I said at the beginning, the pictures were
was finished. When I reached white, I could go no further, and so magical, and the magic had absolutely nothing to do with the com-
the picture was finished. This interest in colour transitions has re- plicated intellectual machinery that had been used to make them.
mained with me. Unfortunately, after a time any system that one At the end of a nine week period painting a picture which was
uses becomes predictable and manipulable, so that one can produce composed of five thousand tiny coloured squares, the picture re-
what one had conceived. At this point the system becomes useless, minded me of nothing so much as my childhood memory of the
and it is necessary to devise another. Berlin townscape. I had always felt that one judges representational
While working on a picture which was a collage of coloured plastic paintings by their abstract qualities, and that one judges abstract
paper clips it occured to me that it was possible to produce grada- paintings by the associative or evocative overtones. If I do not have
tions of colour in other ways than by mixing paint. This picture was to discard these paintings at a later date, then through cold intel-
entirely covered in the paper clips which were laid out in a regular lectuality, and by working in a way that makes it impossible for me
grid, but the colour choices were at random. I bought enough clips to know how the picture will look at the end, I had arrived back at
to finish the picture, mixed them in a large bag, and took them out the beginning.
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