Page 39 - Studio International - December 1970

the right-hand one having been cut vertically contradicted, for that matter) by such ex- painted (in oil paint) from end to end with
somewhere to the left of centre, the nose-end traneous formal elements as the horizontal small Chinese water-colour brushes. But one
seems then to have been folded back along the line, above, which is produced by the wall doesn't handpaint for the sake of the `hand-
top of it: the slightly smaller left-hand dart meeting the ceiling; or by the vertical, away done'; one merely knows that surfaces worked
has merely had its tip snipped off and similarly to the left or right, which is where the wall in this way can—in fact they must—register a
folded back along the top edge, (the direction comes to an end by meeting another wall. The different nuance of spatial evocation and
of each point now being reversed). But it is great formal equation, which each work is, is movement in every single square millimetre....
only by consciously setting out to analyse the already solved within the edges of its own But this digression was intended to illustrate
physical construction of this highly asymmetrical image. Bell's shaped canvases are thus des- the point that Trevor Bell's hand-painted
total image that we even realize the facts out- cribable as centripetal images, in contrast surfaces hold the interest of the spectator in
lined in the above physical information, with all the best-known shaped canvas images their own right as painted surfaces; and that this
because what assails our consciousness is not produced so far, which, as I have already is another reason why one's eye is detained
a sculptural form at all but a great floating suggested, are centrifugal in their action. But indefinitely within the shaped canvas itself in
irregular unified silhouette, internally struc- in addition to this there is a further reason for Bell's case. This is the role of sheer quality; it
tured in terms of bands and expanding their great self-sufficiency as images (meaning detains the eye and induces that lingering of
wedges, both wide and narrow, of red, their ability to hold the eye, and keep it satis- the gaze, that visual meditation which all fine
together with two distinct blues. Our eyes, fied, instead of causing it to wander off into painting compels. In America only the sur-
starting over and over again at the fold-like the corners of the ceiling), and that is in their faces of Rothko, Motherwell, Newman and
crack running down the canvas's centre of quality of surface. Those surfaces are hand- Reinhardt fully meet this requirement in my
gravity—which is not literally the centre of this painted—and by a masterly hand. I have view. Nor does the fact that only the hand-
painting— continually explore, to right and left, myself always believed—through a decade of done can register the necessary subtlety to meet
the always unequal and asymmetric wedges, spray-guns and rollers and other methods of these demands mean that to scribble by hand
measuring them against each other endlessly applying paint so that it was clinically imper- is in itself a guarantee of the creation of the
in a sort of compulsion to disprove the sonal, literally dead flat in quality—in the pictorially significant. Already in the last year
cunningly suggested threat of the boredom of hand-stroked, hand-scribbled, hand-scrubbed or two one is seeing certain Americans (the
pure symmetry breaking out here or there. It application of paint, putting paint on a flat neo-painterly abstractionists) trying out
is a remarkable and tantalizing balancing act surface with a brush is just about the greatest various formulae for hand-doneness—and
that keeps our eyes moving perpetually over possible pleasure I know. But no two artists already the results are reminding us of that
and across and around the truncated dart- can overlap in their nervous brush-writing. cloying final phase of French tachisme; the
shapes, or the double cantilevered wedges, or Further, hand-done paintwork— meaning the latest Darby Bannards look more like Paris
the twin mirrored joined polygonal shapes covering of areas, large and small, in paintings 1955 than he obviously realizes. But a formula
(Copper 1969, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 137 in.) —is an infinitely powerful and subtle means for the spontaneous and the painterly is still
in which, though equivalent sides were the for giving a colour-area its precise spatial not the real thing. Over and over again the
same in length, the twin wings of the piece function; you can manipulate space in dozens basic conceptualism of American art activity
seem asymmetric because all those radiating of different ways by the varied ways in which has applied itself to the phenomenon of the
lines created on the twin surfaces, by being you paint-out an identical area-shape with an spontaneous and succeeded only in producing
`painted' there, are irregular in their placing identical colour-mixture. The mere brush-work a faked facsimile; I would describe most of the
and differ in width and texture, each from of an area endows it with differing kinds of minor Abstract Expressionists in these terms.
the next. space-creating power. You can weave it thick One can of course see brushmarks in plenty in
Why, then, do these shaped canvases of and tight, dense and opaque, in mutually self- the Protractor series of Frank Stella, where
Trevor Bell's, which have been shaped with a obliterating heavy loops, for instance, which the purely geometrical, purely linear pattern
vengeance indeed, escape so completely from force the plastic plane which we sense in the is filled-in with 'colour' — and a very timid, not
the offence I described earlier on—the offence skin of colour back on to the canvas—back to say amateur brushwriting it is we see there.
of fruitlessly involving the spectator in a useless right through it perhaps. Or the pigment can The rather blunt brush hardly knows how to
search for that formal significance in the be semi-transparent, more lightly and rapidly get into those excessively tight geometric
surrounding walls which alone would com- applied, full of nervous flicking movements corners; nor are its sidling movements, up to
plete the experience the canvases themselves which seem to pick up the colour-area as if it and along beside the uniform arcs of the
give promise of—but only a promise? I should were a blanket and hold it (illusionistically of defining white lines, very comfortable. Of
say, by the way, that in a photographic repro- course) a fraction of an inch in front of the course, those ever-present white lines which
duction, where the necessary expanse of actual surface of the canvas. The actual divide every single colour from its neighbour
surrounding wall-space is omitted from the scribble of the application can be infinitely prevent all colour confrontations from ever
plate, the qualities of flatness and saturation, varied; and can have (must have) a thousand happening; the linear grid of even white
and of a hand-manipulated density of image, differing effects, laterally, as a formal force channels insulates all the colours, emasculating
which give these works their feeling of influencing the apparent shape of all adjacent the space-creating function of each and every
strength and self-sufficiency, doesn't alto- area-shapes in the painting. There is the colour pretty completely. Indeed the spatial
gether come over, of course. I think Bell's incredible pull or push one can exert upon a reality of these Protractor paintings is just
canvas image, dominated by triangles, and flat area-shape by the way one's brush—yes, about as confused and self-contradictory as it
almost devoid of the vertical and horizontal brush— churns a uniform colour-mixture in an well could be. The spatial positions which the
edges which implicate the surrounding archi- adjacent area. Again, one may find one has various colours half attempt to take up in
tecture, succeeds in containing within its own induced a sort of life or vibration, in itself relation to one another—as it were across the
silhouette all the architectonic energy which it pretty unanalysable, in an apparently flatly neutralizing white lines—these spatial positions
generates. The canvas itself is of course the painted, apparently uniformly smooth paint- are then made nonsense of by the purely linear
total image. It does not reach out to the area by a paint application which vanishes indications that the semicircular segments are
architecture for support. For its full meaning when dry, except that the brush-scribbles being interleaved one behind another. In a
to be enjoyed no section inside each of these remain semi-visible in relief only. Last year word, all those bright, charming, thin colour-
canvases—no line, no colour-area, no curve my fifteen-foot canvases, involving sixty or infillings, dictated as they are by a geometry
or point—needs to be echoed or reinforced (or more square feet of a single colour, were so symmetrical and so unequivocal that it can