Page 32 - Studio International - June 1972

outside of the painting and introduced into the
painting. It's that they're totally painted
outside of the painting on a separate canvas and
almost rushed into the painting—as an
irritant, sometimes deliberately as an irritant.
Sometimes I enjoy it, I enjoy the buggery of
them. It doesn't always work out that way
because sometimes they're made. I think as
collages they always look additive, an additive
process to the painting. When they are collages
they're always that way. It's that I enjoy the
idea of cutting out and then smacking on,
producing, or throwing into the painting in a
way. I enjoy that soreness, the whole idea of
cutting and then pushing in to a particular
moment of painting which you think's good,
you know, then fucking it just at that moment.
I enjoy that. The soreness of it—I enjoy it.
The wire netting's just to suspend colour,
usually; it's that I really want to suspend that
kind of phenomenon on the surface of the
canvas. That's what it's for. It's there to hang
on to the canvas surface. To literally hang on.
I cannot make with the brush strokes the kind
of suspension I want with the paint. I want the
paint to be beyond the canvas surface and that
I cannot do with the brush. So it's the way to
suspend colour. The only way I can make it
hang on the shapes, above the shapes, across
the shapes makes it, as a colour, a physical
reality. Then it becomes a pickable object
almost. And I can't do that with a brush, I wish
I could. The desire is to suspend paint—it's to
get it up front. It's like in that particular
picture you're talking about—that you were
talking about before—it's not a very thick
painting. It's just thick in moments where the
paint is suspended. That's the clarity in the
dark green picture. The paint's got to be thick.
I think that's because of the history of the
painting rather than in the intention of the
paint.
The grids were to create a non-illusionistic
space to bring the canvas up front. Well, there
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