Page 31 - Studio International - February 1974

painting can travel'. Obviously, statistics Scarlet Verticals, March 1957
can rebut any statement couched in terms as Oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in.
provocatively exclusive as this : my intention Exhibited at Redfern Gallery, 1957;
Galerie Creuze, Paris, 1957
was simply to point to what I conceived as being
the central area of enquiry or exploration in
painting for a decade or two to come. One of
these decades has now passed: yet the emphasis
on consciousness of colour in its own right shows
no sign of abating or dating yet. Indeed the
colour revolution has spread an enormous
influence outwards from painting into every
department of fashion and of the lifestyle and
general design areas of our time : even
automobiles now roll off the assembly lines in
violet, lemon-yellows, iridescent emerald-greens
and terrific oranges and reds. However, I need
one further autobiographical quotation to
reinforce the link between colour and space. In
`Colour in my Painting: 1969' (published in
Studio International) I said:
`Because painting is exclusively concerned
with the seen, as distinct from the known,
pictorial space and pictorial colour are
virtually synonymous. That is to say, for
the human eye there is no space without
its colour; and no colour that does not
create its own space. When you open your eyes,
the texture of the entire visual field . . . consists
of one thing : and that thing is colour.
Variations in this colour texture (which sight
reveals to us) are indications that form exists :
but colour is there first, in that it is the medium
through which form is communicated visually.
And so, in manipulating colour, painting is
organizing the very stuff of which sight or
vision consists'.
In saying that, of course, the claim I am a rigid line: after Mondrian, the cityscape fell been arrived at by the most stunningly
making for painting could not be more into a grid as we looked out of the window. Nor economical means — namely, the staining and
enormous. I am saying that painting organizes was this all. Having structured our natural marking with pigment of a two-dimensional
our sight, dictates the way we see everything vision into accordance with its own unique flat surface bounded by two vertical and two
that we do see — which means nothing less than geometry, its own particular abstraction, so that horizontal edges. Certain novelties of format in
our entire environment. Painting alters the look we saw all objects and all spatial relationships as recent years, such as 'shaped canvases'
of the world for us. I'm not talking now of our if through a grid designed by Cezanne or (meaning those whose boundaries have
practical vision, that 'blind' use of the eyes Mondrian — having done this, painting then departed from the purely rectangular) or
whereby we touch, manipulate, gauge the size of also causes us to project the formal abstract `dimensional painting' have in my view (with
every material object or space of which we make relationships identified with a great painter or a very few exceptions — Trevor Bell and Justin
use in our daily living. I'm referring, on the great movement — to project them back into the Knowles, for example) failed significantly to
contrary, to our contemplative vision, to the visible world in terms of all the things that are carry forward the language of painting, a
sort of seeing we employ the moment we start to man-made — architecture, furniture, machines, language still based in that physical illusionism
think about 'the look of a thing — of any thing, even the curves of the kerbstones of new roads. generated by colour out of a flat surface which
in fact, that comes within our visual range. To sum up, painting first influences our I have attempted to define as space in colour.
People always think that the natural world looks physiological perception (the way we see) and, Shaped canvases, in abandoning rectangular
literally like the paintings of whatever school was secondly, it profoundly affects the shape or formats, sacrifice that insulation from
dominant forty years before : for years after the design we impose on our environment through surrounding walls that painting needs in order
death of Monet educated people unconsciously the creation of all human artefacts. Painting's to operate with formal intensity from within its
projected a patchwork of torn and liquid blobs role in civilization is that of man's laboratory for own bounding edges. The shaped canvas
— the brush-touches of Monet — into the faces, the disinterested exploration of visual disperses itself, as it were, out into the
tea cups, walls or trees around them, appearances as such, an exploration carried out architectural setting which houses it, and thus
unconsciously equating the ragged paint- uninhibited by any practical demands dispersed declines into a merely architectural
textures of Impressionism with reality. What is whatsoever. The painter is and always has been feature or decoration. Dimensional paintings,
true is that all great movements in painting in search of one thing only : and that is, a new on the other hand, tend to degenerate into
produce a pattern of abstraction (and all art is abstract configuration, a new but purely formal painted objects (and I would say in passing
abstract, don't forget) — a pattern which we then significance, a new pattern emerging out of the that nearly all recent brightly painted sculpture
read back into natural appearances. After very mechanics of physical vision itself, a new leads up a cul-de-sac, betraying an amateurish
Cezanne, the roundest apple flaked visibly shape in the organization of colour. ignorance of the nature and operation of colour
before our eyes into rigid facets : after Picasso, Painting's most potent discoveries, in itself, on the one hand, and a belittling regard
the softest breast divided itself diagonally along pursuit of these purely aesthetic goals, have all for the mysteries of the actual three-dimensional
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