Page 29 - Studio International - February 1974

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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