My interests, in the ’60s, were with hunting for totally abstract shapes as ENCLOSURES, where the boundary of these enclosed positive shapes can be thought of as a negative CONTINUOUS LINE. In the search for these shapes I found etching useful, as resists (in the printing sense) could define a negative enclosure; therefore black and white etchings were often starting points for paintings.
Compositionally, I found the square canvas a very interesting shape to work within; the pictures could revolve, as a sculpture can revolve, because there would be no right orientation, and its four CORNERS required four different solutions.
The title, CONTINUOUS LINE, CORNERS AND ENCLOSURES, omits to mention one thing: a preoccupation with MINIMAL COLOUR.
In the late sixties the Artist Jenny Cowern and I built a studio together which is covered by Mary E Burkett and Valerie M Rickerby’s book “A Softer Landscape” ISBN978-0-9528356-7-7.
Illustrated opposite are three oil paintings on canvas 1.37m x 1.37m.
During the 1970s I produced a large exhibition of work entitled “Non Visual Pattern”, shown at Tullie House and Queen Mary’s College London. The content was more conceptual than minimal and therefore I have included nothing from this period apart from the etching “Circles” (no. 42) which has accompanying photographic sources.
In the early 1980s wanting to make multiples of my work, I stumbled on relief printing; first Lino etching/erosion, and then a decade later, Wood engraving. I found myself continuing with the preoccupations of the 1960s but with one overwhelming consistency of interest running through all the work, a desire to remove tone (black and white) from colour relationships so that the full chromatic (red-blue-yellow) value can be seen.