Page 62 - Studio International - June 1973

Review
Recent shows canvas, whereas in fact Gill's canvases are left and complex, immediate and distant. It is like
intact, their weave, their grain undisturbed, their that with these paintings.
integrity cherished rather than violated. And for They are not paintings about painting. Their
a simple, essential reason. The continuity of the intense sensuousness has nothing to do with
canvas is meant to act as a continuum similar to decoration. (Except to those for whom anything
that of consciousness itself. Like the ground of a acquired is a form of decoration.) They refer to
LORRAINE GILL AT THE Persian carpet or the white paper in a Cézanne what surrounds us and, simultaneously, to the
ROMAN CATHOLIC CHAPLAINCY, watercolour, the weave of the canvas formation of our own sensuous experience. This
OXFORD, I-4 MAY `comprehends' the painted events, and relates is why they are mysteriously familiar. This is
one to another irrespective of their own place in why we await them with such expectancy. The
time. The canvas as a screen not of isolated formations they show are around us and within
perceptions but of totalizing consciousness. us. They are paintings painted around the point
Or, to put this another way, the relations of contact between events and our consciousness
between the painting and the surface painted of them. If one strips the domestic associations
upon guarantees that what is depicted is never a away from the word when applied to painting,
configuration of finished forms but a process of one might say that they are profoundly
becoming. The paintings themselves are highly intimate. And such intimacy, as A. N. Whitehead
finished - they never depend upon vague often explained, means a closeness to those
evocation: but what they are about is, by the patterns of formation which guarantee any
nature of its depiction, unfinishable. event's endurance. As for the endurance of the
What is depicted ? An arena of space made paintings, this is expressed in the magnificent
visible by variegated light (colours) is split open assurance with which they await understanding.
to our gaze like a fruit. (Sight splits open every Paintings like Gill's deserve to be seen in a
phenomenon in this way.) The arena is wider and healthier context than that of the
surrounded by infinite blue. Within 'the fruit' usual private art gallery. But one way or another
whose scale is so positively ambiguous that it they throw out a challenge. How soon will they
Lorraine Gill Evolution 1973 can be interpreted as molecule or universe, find the seeing and the public to which they are
Photo: David Carpenter colours amalgamate to create, sometimes, directly and prophetically addressed ?q
amorphous unresolved forces, and sometimes JOHN BERGER
At Oxford during the first week of May there resolved geometric ones. What both kinds of
was the first exhibition of paintings by force have in common is the same unit, module
Lorraine Gill, a painter in her thirties, who was or quantum of irreducible energy. In terms of CLAUDE ROGERS AT THE WHITECHAPEL ART
born in Australia and has now worked in London painting these units are represented by needle- GALLERY, APRIL
for several years. strokes of paint in the shape of thin, curved The dignity which comes strongly out of
The centre-piece of the exhibition was an segments, or dart-like stitches. (The simplest Claude Rogers's retrospective has a lot to do
assembly of nine square canvases placed visual analogy is to picture several shoals of fish with a non-tricky, unswervable dedication to
together to form an overall square. Each canvas intermingling: each shoal is a different colour of making paintings during some forty years of
was complete in itself and at the same time an the spectrum and every shoal, at maximum work. Everyone will agree that their frankness
integral part of the unified overall image. Such a energy, turns white or silver.) (and modesty) shows a fine type of artistic
degree of organization in complexity suggests These units or modules, converge, increase veracity. I like their subdued candour, but other
something of the intelligence and invention of their massed energy, and multiply in the visitors substantially younger than Professor
the painter's vision; it is a tour de force. But, complexity of their relationships until these Rogers may feel a historiographical
fortunately, this is not what first strikes the form a new state, a new conception, the sphere disappointment. The paintings here are not
spectator when in front of it. What strikes you is of a new form, a planet at the heart of the fruit. pertinent to our backlog: they have hardly been
what the work shows, not the skill with which it (The centre canvas shows the planet in touched by art since Cubism. How relevant is
shows it. It reveals rather than demonstrates. formation: the other eight show the phases of this to the looking at them ? The vocatival
To reproduce this nine-canvas work would convergence around it.) The vocabulary in rhetoric of the catalogue initially confuses. Is
require more pages and plates than are at the words may sound heavy because it is impossible Andrew Forge addressing a contemporary or
moment available. So I must describe it in to cleanse it of discredited symbolism. The some pre-war Slade student ? Anti-historical
words, and reproduce instead one of the 20 visual vocabulary of these paintings is as clean as and determinedly into the artist's experience
smaller paintings (36x 36 ins) which flanked first perception. before the subject, this is a painting teacher's
the centre-piece. Visualize a tree in a field, sunlight and a spiel to those who have no modern
It is necessary first to try to describe Gill's strong wind blowing clouds across the sky. The sophistication - perhaps rightly, since Rogers's
method of painting. Many layers or touches of shadow of the tree, with a long branch clearly own sophistication (which have to do with his
thin colour are applied to the canvas. Like the visible, falls on the grass of the field. The wind bluffness) and achievements are craftsmanlike in
colours of the spectrum, these applied colours blows a cloud across the sun. The shadow of the just that area. This is not painting that publicly
both derive from and aspire to the whiteness of cloud reaches the field and obliterates the makes an avowal of its place in contemporary
light. The process involved is light/colour/light. shadow of the tree - like a drawing on a art. One feels that the quality is still clamped on
(Always remembering that colour is divided blackboard wiped out. The sun comes out from the easel, before students in Gower Street.
light). The first light is the white priming of behind the cloud and reinstates the shadow of Rogers, who retires this year from his position
the canvas; the second, on, as it were, this side of the tree on the green grass. The wind blows as Professor of Fine Art at Reading University,
the variegations of colour, is the light of applied another cloud across the sun. This time you had a good ten years of painting between the end
white pigment - rarely there but present await the return of the light and of the precise of his student days at the Slade and the
everywhere as an ideal. large shadow of the tree with a strangely foundation of the Euston Road School at the end
The layers or touches of colour might be pleasurable expectancy. Such expectancy might of the thirties. Forge says things about the
thought of as stains (as in the work of Morris be written about and analysed at length. But doggedly representational manner of working,
Louis) but this suggests an attack upon the when it is visually satisfied, its meaning is simple claiming that it 'offered a way out of the trap
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