Page 34 - Studio International - November 1968

The development of Ian Stephenson's painting

Andrew Forge

Ian Stephenson, it seems, is hardly capable of laying paint on flat.
Everything that he has done, from his earliest tentative studies to the
latest twelve foot canvases has in common a stippled surface. It is
an obsession, and as such it is rooted at a far deeper level than the
specialized preoccupations of a particular year. It is not, one might
guess, just the consequence of a styllistic decision but the reflection of
some ancient relationship, essential not only to his view of painting
but of the world itself.
There are areas in his painting—particularly the latest—where the
numberless particles of paint are massed at random. The canvas is
covered with layer upon layer of dots; individual colour differences
are absorbed in the tonality of the mass. One is confronted by a cloud,
spongy, shifting. We recognize sensations of distance—and its oppo-
site as when with closed lids we contemplate the warm veiled greys
and shifting points and sparks that are all one can see with one's
eyes shut. There are no stepping stones in these last pictures, no
anchorages with space between. All is filled. All is void.
There is an analogy here with the filmy fields of Rothko. But the
differences are extremely significant. When in front of Rothko and
one moves in close, the colour wraps round more closely. The experi-
ence is heightened. The surface of the picture is a surface of semi-
transparent colour, closer, more enveloping. Here, though, with
Stephenson, the surface is not the same. The picture changes scale
as one draws into it. The surface resolves itself into thousands and
thousands of dots which one is far more clearly aware of outside one-
self—at a distance—than before. To the oceanic sensations of the
whole is added an awareness of multitude, sharpness, and the
minute structures that the eye unravels in each inch of paint.
The transition from 'cloud' to 'myriad' and back again is available
at will. There is no 'correct' view of it.
Compare these paintings with the images on a TV screen, a news-
print photograph or a mezzo-tint. In all these cases the lines or dots
are functional; in moving 'in' to examine the system or 'out' to read
the image we are crossing a distinct threshold in the quality of our
attention. Looking at the painting this journey does not span either/
or alternatives: the work is a totality and each movement we make is endless speculation and revision. His ideas are rigorous; the processes
an enlargement of our relationship to it, and indeed uncovers new they set in motion are subject to infinite nuance.
dimensions of the subject-matter. The point is that the image is the
upshot of how it is made. Among Stephenson's first exhibited pictures were a group of studies
This complexity is typical of the way he relates to painting himself: painted on hardboard in dots of ochre and brown and cream. Some
painting, one feels encompasses a multiplicity of experience, widely could be read as still-life groups; others had clear references to
contrasting sensations stemming from the same source, untrammelled wooden chairs. In some of these pictures the forms are clumped
choice. His pictures are the opposite of one-shot. They are difficult, together as if in an invisible box in the centre of the rectangle, a few
demanding close and varied attention. There is much of the peda- forms jutting out into the surrounding margin. In others the panel is
gogue in him, a tendency towards extreme conceptualization which enclosed in an ordinary plain wooden frame, but the picture is not
shows particularly in some of the Small Spray studies which are like enclosed by it and spreads its dots out over it, taking it in. Extra-
laboratory demonstrations. At the same time doubt is always ordinary tensions result, the flat optical screen of dots flattening the
present and the techniques and programmes he devises for himself frame, while the frame's mitred corners, the diagonal cracks in it,
are invariably open, wayward and humorous even, with room for become part of the drawing and introduce an effect of perspective.
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