On the Development of My Non-Figurative Paintings and Constructions

Abstract

Although visual art has been my main means of expression, my studies in secondary school were biased towards the natural sciences. I found that they stimulated my imagination and I gained a respect for scientific methods. I concluded that the culture in which we live is generated largely by the work of scientists and technologists and it is to this aspect of culture that I respond as an artist. It is, however, to Mondrian that I owe my awakening to the possiblities of non-figurative art. A great fillip to my early work as a painter came from the reading of popular texts on visual psychology and other subjects that help one to bridge the rift between art and science. Thus I became interested in form in its own right, as opposed to my earlier view of form as being suggestive of function or purpose or the individual materialization of Platonic stereotypes. This new attitude I expressed in hard-edge non-figurative paintings, where an illusion of space by means of perspective is eliminated but the figure-ground ambiguity described in Gestalt psychology [1] is exploited. The compositions consist of interwoven bounded areas, each of which can be interpreted as constituting the background to the remaining areas. In my later hardedge paintings, areas are grouped together to reduce the figure-ground ambiguity (Fig. 1). At this stage, I became dissatisfied with painting on a flat surface and I began to make reliefs and freestanding constructions in which single forms were given physical independence of others in a group.