Page 37 - Studio International - November 1972

the shape the drawing contains; is removed
enough from the edges to do so. Yet it is close
enough to the edges to withdraw this implication
as soon as it makes it — to keep the painting as all
surface, with drawing a part of surface. At least,
it does this when most successful. As a method —
and a daring one — it has great technical
difficulties : of getting the adjustments of colour
(intensity as well as hue) and touch just right so
that the centre of the painting will not read too
strongly as shape. If this happens — and it does
sometimes — the painterly interior starts to read
as a decorative infilling, while the corridors up
the sides look redundant 'empty' spaces.
In this respect, Bannard seems to have had
the most trouble with the pictures using a kind
of chrome yellow interior. Tallahasee Sunset and,
especially, Bright Dye Summer look unresolved.
Both join the yellow with a very different and
contrasting mood of colour outside. This
seems to compress, and therefore separate, the
interior, which becomes too much a shape. In
turn, this makes the paintings look rather
empty in the areas surrounding these 'shapes'.
It is not only the colour that causes this to
happen, but the muffled atmospheric treatment
of the interior. The effect is somewhat similar to
that of Rothko's suspended clouds; and
Rothko's paintings are best, in my experience,
when the clouds leave very little space between
themselves and the framing edge. To have
cropped in to resolve the paintings this way was
not available to Bannard; not because of the
`Rothko look' this might have encouraged but
because the drawing around the interior would
come too close to the edge as well. Again, the
similarity to an 'Olitski look' would not have
mattered in itself. What would have mattered is
that the interior space would tend to tip back
obliquely behind the drawing in the way it does
in Olitski's paintings (or at least did so until
recently). Clearly, Bannard does not want this.
He goes for a basic frontality; one that can
open up and dissolve itself, but a frontality
nevertheless. He values, as he has said so often,
a natural surfaceness of spread colour — colour
that extends and opens itself across the flat
surface, reaching into other colours in areas of
influence. Hence his admiration for Still's
painting (which uses zones of colour rather than
shapes as such), and hence his constant need to
reduce the specificity of shape in these current
works.

Darby Bannard
Nankeen 1972
1o8 x 63 in.

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