Page 28 - Studio International - February 1974

Square Leaves, July 1952
Oil on canvas, 3o X 20 in.
Exhibited at Hanover Gallery, London, 1953
what I'm doing with that colour — every time,
the mere existence of the descriptive words and
phrases has arrested the silent visual process of
which the painting was the record. The verbal
equivalent of the pictorial realities may be highly
accurate, it may be intensely evocative of the
painting or the visual sensations concerned;
and if one is writing or speaking about a dangerous. Verbal description stops visual
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meditation in its tracks — and the more
brilliant and profound that description is the
more deadly its effect in freezing or arresting the
instinctive flow of the purely visual thinking
which, in the painter, first produces the painting
and, in the spectator, lies at the heart of his
experience of the painting. In a catalogue note
for my exhibition last year at the Whitechapel
Gallery, London, I therefore said : '. . . if one
still speaks or writes occasionally about one's
painting it is always in the hope that what one is
saying in words will actually release people from
the word-bound concepts of language itself,
opening up for them instead the purely visual
experience of the eye, which words can evoke
but never define. I wish my words about
painting to militate against mere verbal
consciousness. Too much painting today arises
out of verbal consciousness : too much painting
springs out of and is dictated by a conceptual
consciousness which is verbal in origin and
utterly unintuitive'.
So now, having used words to put words in
their place and firmly delimit their credibility
and status in relation to painting and the world
of the eye, I'll proceed. But . . . 'I gotta use
words when I talk to you', to quote T. S. Eliot.
So, in spite of myself, I'll continue this lecture
in the English language. . . .
One of the more curious dichotomies, when
you come to think of it, is our mental tendency
to divide colourshape, or colourform, into
colour and form or shape and colour, as _though
one could have colour without shape or shape
without colour. As far as the experience of our
human eyes is concerned — and that,
exclusively, is the experience which concerns a
painter above all others — colour is shape and
shape is colour. As far as pure visual sensation
goes colour and shape are always one and the
same thing. What we call shape is something
that begins to be apparent because there is a
place where one colour ends and another begins
— and this meeting-place of colours becomes, in
our consciousness, an edge, a line, an outline,
a profile, a boundary or frontier between two
differing colour-areas. I am gazing at an area
of apricot-ochre : this apricot-ochre area is
opaque but luminous and flattish; my eye
rapidly traverses this flattish opaque apricot
expanse and arrives at a frontier along which
the apricot-ochre ceases and a field of violet-
blue takes over : this meeting point of apricot-
ochre and violet-blue becomes in our
consciousness a thing in its own right, a thing
we call 'a line'; and this line — a thing created
solely in our vision by the continuousness of the
meeting points of those two fields of ochre and
blue — this particular line 'defines', as our verbal
painting one naturally strives to do just this — to language would put it, the edge of a cloud in the
find words which are so evocative, so accurately sky.
descriptive, that the listener has the illusion that In attempting to relate my visual experience
he is seeing the painting, that it is visually of that cloud's edge in this way — breaking it
present to his mind, with all the force of down into a sequence, a sequence of successive
hallucination. Great art criticism does just this acts of developing recognition — I was trying to
to us. And that precisely is why it is so demonstrate the distance separating pure visual
sensation of colour, at one end of the process,