I usually find myself painting in series. I tend to work on two or three paintings at the one time, because when I get one to a certain stage I find I perhaps have to leave off for a while and think about it, and in the meantime I can go back onto another one which I’ve left previously, and I find that I can work continuously.
Although I’ve been painting a number of different series of paintings, there’s one very strong link. Although they look, tend to look very different to each other at first, is that there’s a strong colour rhythm going on in all of them, whether they’re geometric or non-geometric. By colour rhythm I mean something which you see not as dark and light, because you can get rhythms in drawings or in painting, which depend on darks and lights. Although there are darks and lights in the paintings, it’s the colour, one colour working against another, and in paintings you can eradicate the feeling of dark and light in a certain way, so that the colours work against one another, and according to choice, you can by the use of different keys, get general feeling of sharpness and liveliness, or perhaps calmness, and so on.
I’ve always thought over the years that the formal considerations of painting were very important, but more and more I think that the paintings I’m doing now, although they’re not portraits of anything, they are pictures from life. In other words, I’m becoming more aware of everything around me.
