Page 35 - Studio International - December 1970

works without the arguments might not make indeed the sensation of depth; and on the lines or movements of thrust generated in the
it alone. So one reaches the appalling con- other there is the physical reality of the flat painting reflect and refract, laterally, from the
clusion that the efficiency of the modern picture surface. Good painting creates an edges : and somehow, if those edges themselves
machinery of art promotion is now so great experience which contains both.' And I con- depart from the vertical and the horizontal,
that the physical objects chosen to become the tinued : 'The existence of pictorial space the fullest intensity of activity—reflected lines
subject-matter of the promotional exercise implies the partial obliteration of a canvas's of force being endlessly superimposed upon
may be selected with something approaching surface from our consciousness. This is the the original lines of the 'composition' (no
total arbitrariness. Anything can be successfully role of colour: to push back or bring forward apologies for this dated word) until the surface
promoted now ... but only for the time being, the required section of the design. The advance of the work is unendingly active and complex—
I firmly believe. or recession of different colours in juxtaposition is a somehow this intensity of activity is fatally
physical property of colour: it is a physical impossi- relaxed. Lines of force which begin their
Ever since I can remember one has been bility to paint shapes on a surface, using different journey in the canvas refract at angles which
hearing repeated predictions that the death colours ...and avoid the illusion of the recession of lead them too quickly outside the picture for-
of painting is at hand. Years ago it was easel parts of that surface.' mat from boundary edges which are other
painting that was supposed to have had it. In the past I have also explained why it seems than vertical or horizontal, (from the boun-
Today those idiomatic developments which to me that the limits of the surface which are daries of a 'shaped canvas', that is) thus
are supposed to be about to relegate the flat the painting have most frequently assumed a emptying the painted area of the picture
painted surface to the historical past include rectangular format. To summarize now: two (which is the picture) of half its formal inten-
environmental art, kinetic art of all descrip- vertical sides together with a horizontal top sity and complexity (and that complexity
tions, including the organizations of light in and bottom in fact provide the most neutral itself is a presence rather than an incident, or
the raw (that is, involving the sources of light boundaries for circumscribing the almost incidents, in painting involving large and
as well as the utilization of light reflected or infinite number of angles of lateral thrust and misleading 'empty' areas of colour). All this is
refracted from moving or fixed surfaces) and counter-thrust which are generated by the to say that a canvas whose edges depart from
of course a host of three-dimensional struc- markings of colour (and all marks are colour) a rectilinear relationship deprives itself of half
tures, the surfaces of which have been pig- placed on that surface. The multi-directional those invisible ricocheting movements of
mented in one way or another—works which
go under the heading of 'sculpture', 'reliefs',
`shaped canvases' or, finally, to use a phrase
first suggested by the English artist Justin
Knowles, 'dimensional painting'. One of the
reasons why I remain adamantly sceptical
about the 'death of painting' is that it has
always seemed to me that making marks on a
flat canvas and depositing films of colour
upon it remains the most brilliantly economical
way of giving an outward expression, a pheno-
menal existence, to the million and one
images and configurations which seem to arise
in a human mind attuned, above everything
else, to the perpetual sensations of sight which
flood in through the eyes every second of our
waking lives. The elementary point that
painting is to do with sight — rather than
abstract knowledge — seems almost to be over-
looked at present. Compared with the creation
of solid objects, which are only themselves, paint-
ing is and always has been a vastly sophisti- 3
cated means of communication. All painted Trevor Bell
Red 1970
surfaces operate in two ways simultaneously Acrylic on canvas
upon the observer: we apprehend at one and 118x 136 in.
the same instant the physical nature, the 4
Trevor Bell
angle, the lateral limits, the texture, the Split jet 1970
material and the pigmentation of the painting Acrylic on canvas
89x 172 in.
as object; and we also experience an illusion
5
of spatial realities which is generated directly Trevor Bell
out of the physical juxtaposition of different Split jet, Wight and Twin 1968-70
Acrylic on canvas
colours adjacent to one another upon that 89x 172 in., 72x 183 in.,
physical surface. In 1953 'Space in Colour 102x 145 in.
catalogue introduction' I wrote : 'In painting, 6
Trevor Bell
space and form are not actual, as they are in Out 1969
sculpture, but illusory. Painting, indeed, is Acrylic on canvas
101 x214 in.
essentially an art of illusion; and 'pictorial
7
science' is simply that accumulated knowledge Trevor Bell
which enables the painter to control this Copper 1969
Acrylic on canvas
illusion.... But the secret of good painting... 120x 137 in.
lies in its adjustment of an inescapable dua-
lism: on the one hand there is the illusion,