Page 32 - Studio International - February 1974

reality of any solid object — which is the realm of (Top) (Bottom)
sculpture — on the other).2 Black Painting — Red, Brown, Olive, July 1959 Orange Painting (Brown, Ochre and Black),
Oil on canvas, 38 x 48 in. January 1962
I said just now that '... the entire visual Exhibited at the John Moores Liverpool exhibition, Oil on canvas, 48 x 6o in.
field . . . consists of one thing : and that thing is 1959 Exhibited at Bertha Schaefer Gallery,
New York, 1962
colour'. I've also suggested that 'Colour is the
utterly indispensable means for realizing . . .
pictorial space'. Actually, colour — meaning
physical pigment itself — is the sole means of
the painter : the whole historic art of painting
arises out of this purely physical fact — that
differing colours juxtaposed on a flat surface
pull and twist against each other, and in so doing
create sensations, or illusions, of space.
Painting is nothing more than the organization of
colour. But all sensation of colour is relative:
by which I mean that one's awareness of the
colour of a colour is dependent almost entirely
upon a second colour being present. If your
entire visual field is occupied by one colour
you will very rapidly become desensitized to it.
Let us say you are standing only two feet away
from an enormous and evenly painted red wall —
your eye will so rapidly be 'saturated' by the
vibration of redness that you will in a matter of
seconds cease to be aware of the precise redness
of that red. But raise a pink hand, holding a
blue handkerchief up before this red wall and
the redness of its red instantly springs back to
life, together with the blueness of the blue and
the pinkness of the pink ! All of which may
sound obvious. But I am trying at this point to
clarify two sensations. Firstly, a colour is most
intense when it is delimited; and the sharper the
boundaries or frontiers or linear edges which
delimit it are, the more intense that colour will
be. And this intensification is of course due to
the fact that that edge, or frontier, is only there
because another colour exists beyond it — it is
literally the frontier where two colours meet:
that meeting defines it. And where two colours
meet there is always intense activity. Secondly,
along all such mutual frontiers between
differing colours there is always enormous
distortion of one colour by the other. I have
placed a disc of one red on a field of another red,
and found the red of the disc cooling off almost
into green!
I was asked the other day when it was that I
first used colour at full strength. Any direct
question about my work is always a slight shock;
I have to pull myself together — and actually to
think — before answering: and the reason for
this, I suppose, is that painting is more the
result of feeling and intuition than of any
sheerly intellectual or ratiocinative process.
So it is rather to my own surprise that I realize
that the answer to that question is — in the late
Forties, when my work was figurative, and was
generally observed to be registering the
influence of Braque (about whom I had written
at length in 1946). Anyway, it is true that my
still-lifes and interiors of 1948-1952 were
constructed with flat area-planes of reds, blues
and yellows applied at full strength, just as they
came from the tube. These full-strength colour-
areas were slotted into a network of linear
drawing: and it was this drawing which was to
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