Page 29 - Studio International - February 1974
P. 29

and the final arrival at a mere concept at the   Vertical, January 1956
                                                   Oil on hardboard, 96 x 48 in.
         other. We as it were distil our conceptual
                                                   Exhibited at Redfern Gallery,
         knowledge —from sensation — through the sort   London, 1956
         of stages I've suggested in describing my eyes'
         encounter with a patch of apricot-ochre. But
         by the time my mind was in possession of the
         concept 'a cloud in a blue sky', my full
         consciousness had ceased to focus itself upon the
         purely visual experience of an apricot-ochre
         opacity edging itself into mutual definition
         against an opposing area of violet-blue. There is
         thus always a rivalry between sensation as such
         and concepts as such. Apricot edging against
         violet : that was the sensation. A line between
         apricot and violet: that was half-way between a
        sensation and a concept. A cloud in the sky :
         now we've travelled all the way to a concept —
         and as that concept spreads itself inside the
         mind, at that very second sensation switches
         itself off, and momentarily — while you think
         your thought about that cloud — you are a blind
         man, seeing nothing, although your eyes stay
         open. This is why concepts, and also symbols,
         are the enemy of painting, which has as its
         unique domain the realm of pure visual
        sensation. Painting should start in that multi-
         coloured, and at first amorphous, texture of
        coloured light which is what fills your vision,
         from eyelid to eyelid, when you open your eyes.
         The finished painting should also end in pure
        sensation of colour — having passed into the
        realm of the conceptual in the process, and come
        out again at the other side. What happens to it
        in the process will be the subject of the rest of
        this talk, in which I shall draw on examples of
        my work during the last sixteen years. But first
        we have to consider another vital factor in the
        visual language of the painter — the factor of
        space.
          During the late Forties, as art critic of the
         New Statesman, I was frequently criticized for
        what was thought to be my obsession with
        pictorial space: indeed, in 195o I was given the
        sack! I had frequently asserted that a great
        painter was one who succeeded in creating a
        new species of pictorial space. In 1953 I
        organized an exhibition in London for which,
        after weeks of thought, I managed to think of a
        title — 'Space in Colour'. Today, this hardly
        sounds startling. Yet for me it still holds the
        clue to the greatest satisfactions that the purely
        pictorial experience can offer us. In the 'Space
        in Colour' catalogue I said:
          `In painting, space and form are not actual, as
        they are in sculpture, but illusory. Painting,
        indeed, is essentially an art of illusion . . . But
        the secret of good painting — of whatever age
        or school . . . lies in its adjustment of an
        inescapable dualism : on the one hand there
        is the illusion, indeed the sensation, of depth;
        and on the other there is the physical reality
        of the flat picture-surface. Good painting
        creates an experience which contains both. It
        creates a sensation of voluminous spatial
        reality which is so intimately bound up with
        the flatnesses of the design at the surface that
        it may be said to exist only in terms of such
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