Page 39 - Studio International - November 1968

dent. Multi-colured banks of paint gathered like drifts around the dialectic of outside/inside, object/illusion is raised to a dramatic level.
central area, framed with a square. Cut-outs were collaged into the Where does a picture end ? The question is obviously real to him and
surface; his hand print was like an exclamation at the top of the extremely moving. It is as though however committed he is to the
picture. In the later state (1965) much of this incident has dis- institution of painting he is permanently restless at its relationship
appeared. Only the square remains clear-cut, a still yet hovering with the outside world and the limitations of its subject matter. His
frame to the central area with its open depths and aureol of light. painting is self-reflexive but not self-contained and everything that
Everything else is buried in a humming snow. he does is suggestive of a wider view.
The processes of stencil and of collage as target are at present more Here perhaps is one clue to the meaning of the obsession with a
important in the smaller works on paper than in the large canvases. stippled surface. The myriad dots represent, quite specifically, a view
He has made numbers of these Spray Studies in which the mechanics of reality. At the crudest level they stand for its homogeneity. At
of sprayed paint are opened out on the white paper surface and the same time they stand for the continual flux of the world, the
applied to precisely defined tasks. Regular shapes or found collage unending interpenetration of space and matter—or rather, of space
elements such as paper palettes, tie-on labels, paper flowers, tickets, and matter in process. Perceptually they image our awareness of
may be used as registers for the spray. How much can they take and relationships in flux: hardly ever has he painted a discrete form or
still maintain their identity within the cloud of paint ? How much object. Painting is process, relationship, awareness. Objects come
do they need to be absorbed in it, or in equilibrium with it? They real: the palette, the bread-board, the broken panel, the canvas.
come and go within it, measuring its depth in a sense, while at the And finally the dots offer as no conceivable alternative could, a
same time opening up a gap between the space structured into the range of perceptual experience which corresponds symbolically
fall of the paint and their own pasted-down space on the surface of with our feelings when we try to imagine the continuity of the world—
the paper. How much paint can they take before they are obliterated when, for example, we try to unify the experience of the blotting
completely? There are some where gradations are as finely con- paper under our hand, the wall across the room and the sky out of
trolled (by what combinations of masking, programming and skill) the window. Because the key feature of the stippled surface—and it
as in a Seurat drawing; others where the speckling appears random; is this which he is exploring singlemindedly in the latest pictures—is
others still where different systems of spray are collaged together and that the more we realize of the minuteness and multitude of the
absorbed into a third system. grain, the more it expands. These fine-grained clouds are infinite.
The closer we are to them, the more we see of them in terms of their
Before cubism the frame symbolized a window within which we particularity, the more they dissolve and reform their boundaries,
could expect to see anything. Since, it has become a more tenuous continually expanding. The latest pictures perform a characteristic
threshold, more obviously part of the picture and potentially a bridge leap-frog. They are paired canvases of the same size. They are to be
to the world outside the picture. In those earliest works of seen adjacent in any order. The inner edges can move to the outside;
Stephenson's it was as though the picture absorbed the frame into the top can become the bottom or the centre or the side. There are
itself, and as though the paint was eager to match its space-making no accents now, no incidents. No two inches are alike although the
power with the world outside. Such reciprocal movements, exploding pictures are the same all over. A structure, the upshot of the very
outwards, folding inwards, were repeated with increasing com- process of working across the canvas, is to be discovered in each
plexity. The 'broken' pictures of 1959 are images in which the inch. The number of dots is beyond imagination.