1. Structure
I began life as a painter in the 50s. Painterly gestures, made from the stomach while denying the head, were typical of the strategy adopted by the avant-guarde at the time. "A painting was finished if it worked" was a popular but unsatisfactory measure by which to proceed. It was not that I was scared to make intuitive gestures, I tried; but the intuitive gesture offers no satisfactory ground for dialogue - only inspiration via imitation. I chose instead to explore the interaction of colour where there was a clear measure by which to judge the effect to the experiments I was making. I felt vindicated in following this independent approach when the Tate bought one of my paintings in 1962.
However colour needs form to articulate it (how big is red?) and soon found myself more interested in form than in colour. I took a piece of bent wire and rotated it 10 degrees at a time. As the form changed I noted the points where the wire profile crossed a vertical line held behind it and in this way produced a topographical map of the bent wire.
(Column no.1 in Front of its Own Image)
..
As the sixites rolled on cybernetics became a topic of hot debate among painters much as photography had been in the previous century. I took the view that the computer was an unwelcome competitor and tried to imagine problems that would confound what I then regarded as an inhuman and unwieldy monster. I took a strip of paper and folded it at an angel of 40 degrees but left the end sticking up at an angle of 80 degrees then repeated the operation several times keeping the side equal in lenght. I aimed to come back to the starting point but for me it was a trial and error situation which made me wonder whether the computer would offer a better solution. I was afraid it could.
So then I tried to by-pass the computer altogether by stretching elastisized cloth between two wooden battens. By moving the battens I could distort an image drawn on the elastic through several repetative stages and I devised top-down programs accordingly. However the process was limited by the fact that the elstastisized cloth would stretch in only one direction at a time.
(Looped Circle)
2. Experiences of Residencies
I was still trying to extend the application of the analogue device when I received an invitation to take part in the first "Creativity and Cognition" conference in Loughborough. What amazed me here was the incredible range and diversity of the problems which engaged the other participants at the conference as though the horizon of imaginitive possibilities had suddenly been exploded. At the same time I found it hard to relate to the results of their work partly no doubt because I was unfamiliar with the technology.
Shortly after this Professor Edmonds invited four of us to Loughborough to pursue whatever interests were uppermost in our minds. We were offered the assistence of experts from the university faculty which Professor Edmonds arranged to suit our different needs. It was such a generous offer that it proved difficult to make an adequate response. Boolean nets was my problem but despite several immensely patient sessions with a mathematician the mathematics defeated me. In the end my advisor produced a video of "The Game of Life", a fascinating program, but being time based I felt as a painter that it was not for me. Happily this was not all the week had to offer since we all four benefitted from each others experience. A visitor from Germany brought a drawing which she wanted to realize in print. I was surprised since her problem did not seem to relate to the computer until I realized that transposing a drawing on the monitor into a finished product was not as straight forward as I had assumed and a vital extension of the technology. Another visitor from Holland wanted to experience virtual reality and we were all offered a brief but astonishing turn with the helmet. Back home this visitor made impressive paintings based on his experience of virtual reality.
3. Short and longer term impact on my work
It was not until I came across a non-periodic pattern by Roger Penrose that I was somewhat reluctantly converted. What I saw in Penrose's pattern was a fraction of space like a seed that reveals itself in time. It reminded me of water broken by whirlpools which disappear only to reform elsewhere in an expanding space, or again like a Modrian painting without the neoplatonic ideal which inspired it. Indeed it was a pattern with many contending centres and no certain outcome like the evolution of life itself. But what in particular caught my attention was the pentagonal organization of space intead of the rectangular convention which is the more generally accepted. The latter adopted by Mondrian with his verticals and horizontals reflects stability whereas the former is more like the space I experience in an expanding / contracting world view.
However my response has nothing to do with the problem that confronted Penrose. His concern was to tile the plane with the fewest possible number of shapes, a well defined mathematical problem. Whereas my concern is to define the many associations his pattern inspired. If I could reduce the number of associations to one I thought the computer would quickly resolve the problem but because I have not been able to do this I believe the computer will offer as many, if not more solutions than I have associations. I forsee that it could divert me from my present objective by suggesting new ones, and ones that would be better aligned to its own way of operating. On the other hand I recently saw, in the exhibiton "Apocalypse" at the R.A., a sculpture of the Pope being knocked down by a meteorite. It seemed obliquely close to the kind of expression I was myself seeking but I could find no logical way to connect it to my own project. In fact I wondered what sort of logical explanation could possibly account for it?
(towards chaos)