Sydney Ball: True Colours

Sydney Ball: True Colours

In 2008, Anne Loxely, then the Curator of Penrith Regional Gallery and the Lewer’s Bequest sat down with Sydney Ball, a pioneer of early Australian Abstraction, to discuss his processes and philosophy. The conversation that followed conextualised the life’s work of one of Australia’s great painters, and is reprinted here in the lead up to his exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney featuring never before seen works on paper and a focus on his highly influential Canto series.

Anne Loxley (AL)/ In your notes for the Ford Foundation Scholarship application (1964) you wrote: ‘It is my intention...to further develop my personal expression and maturity of style. My previous year has been the study of pure colour as a structural and spatial unit, with its own capacity for motion’. How do you feel about that now?

Sydney Ball (SB)/ That hasn’t changed over the years, with the exception of moving to a rural area where I wanted to use landscape as the basis for the work. The whole colour field area that I have been concerned with since 1963 has been a summation of those early words. I decided to go to New York and study with Hans Hofmann; I liked his teaching technique and his view that you needed to eliminate the unnecessary and concentrate on the necessary. It wasn’t until getting to New York [in 1963] and seeing solo exhibitions, especially at the Museum of Modern Art, that I wanted to eliminate the peripheral marks and concentrate on the colour itself.

AL/ What was important about those first classes at the Art Students League?

SB/ I got to New York with a lot of works I had started in Adelaide and carried on working. A couple of these were like landscapes. They had a horizon line, sky, land, an inflection of a figure, which was broken down into a more abstract shape, and inflections of the field. Every Tuesday night at the League, Theodoros Stamos had a class criticism where students would talk about their work. I’d shown in group shows, never had a solo show and I’d never had criticism, so I lacked confidence to be able to talk about it. I set the works up and Stamos said: ‘Not bad. I like that one, I like parts of that one, I don’t like that one’. He gave me confidence as an artist. He put one of the works on its side and said: ‘It changes the whole nature of the work; it’s no longer a formal landscape, it’s an abstracted painting’. There was this band corning down and the inflection of the field on the side. Just putting it on its side was a total change in what it could be. I thought that was much more interesting. That’s where the Bands developed.

AL/ What did Stamos give you besides confidence?

SB/ While Stamos was more of an abstract expressionist, he still had strong colour content. He introduced me to a number of other artists who were also involved in abstract expressionism but who, like Mark Rothko, concentrated on colour, on the finer points of colour exploration, on ideas that could be expressed solely through colour without an image.

AL/ When I first read Donald Judd’s review of your first solo exhibition, I thought it was ungenerous, but on reflection ‘fairly abecedarian’ is quite promising.

SB/ Compared to some of the other critiques in that magazine, I thought it was a very good review. ‘Abecedarian’ means ‘learning the alphabet’. It was quite true; I was learning the alphabet of colour painting with the imagery of the early vertical band paintings. That’s one of the reasons I finished off that series because I needed more out of a painting than it being a reflection of thousands of other younger artists that were working with colour, verticals and horizontals. I wanted a more personal statement.

AL/ How did you get from the Bands to the Canto?

SB/ One day, I saw this print with an elliptical mount, and I thought that another shape would contain the verticals and make them slightly different. I tried at first with a colour lithograph and the verticals were too suppressed within the ellipse, then I thought of a circle. I was reading Ezra Pound’s ‘Canto’ poems and I saw the series content within that framework. I was also interested, through Stamos’s concern with Japanese and Chinese calligraphy and mark making, in the circle as the symbol of infinity. It gave me the ‘ongoing-ness’ of that series that I stayed with for a number of years.

AL/ When the Canto were exhibited here, two words that recurred in the criticism were ‘optical’ and ‘kinetic’.

SB/ Both were wrong. I was after more than the opticality of painting; I needed that sublime quality where you know there’s something else happening within the work, which is not just optical—perhaps like great music where you hear a piece and it comes together so well you know it was perfect, the essence is there.

AL/ But your Ford Foundation notes stated your interest in colour’s ‘capacity for motion’.

SB/ I didn’t go out of my way to make an optical painting. Two words that I’ve always thought were of prime importance are ‘what if?’ What if I do this? Back in Australia, I made up about four kinetic boxes, one in plastic, which was painted, and three perspex ones, but because I didn’t have the ability to pay for and investigate glues, I didn’t go on with it. I felt that if I wanted to make a construction it would be a more natural process. And it wouldn’t be kinetic; it would be a three-dimensional placement of an object.

AL/ In 1968, on seeing a number of works from your Persian series, John Coburn described ‘a vigorous grandeur that seemed to burst beyond the frame’. 2

SB/ In New York I saw artists like Barnett Newman, in whose work the large field wasn’t just contained within the parameters of the rectangle, it expanded out. I still like that expansion attitude. Jackson Pollock had it, and the other great exponent of course was Claude Monet. His Waterlilies just grew; gave you this lovely sense of this pond expanding, this field with beautiful waterlilies. By taking out the horizontal line, that line which made it a landscape, he threw up the background into this magnificent area of paint, so the pond area was very frontal. There was the lovely activity of the hand, but it was flat two-dimensional painting.

AL/ What would you say to McCaughey’s observation that the unity of the Modulars was based on ‘incongruence’? 3

SB/ Instead of making the natural format of a rectangle or square, I wanted to bring the negative background of the wall in as part of the painting; I wanted the outside space to cut into the painting. It’s what Caro did. He used the negative space as an active field. 4 With most of the constructions, I wanted that ground to become an active part of the painting.

AL/ Can you talk about the quality of light in colour?

SB/ Morris Louis had a much softer light to the colour. It didn’t have the intensity of a Ken Noland, where it was rich saturation of colour. With Helen Frankenthaler the paint saturated through the surface and crystals formed on

Sydney Ball Westfold Wall, 1976 screenprint 80 x 120cm, edition 15/25

Sydney Ball Westfold Wall, 1976 screenprint 80 x 120cm, edition 15/25

the back of the canvas, so when she reversed the canvas and used that lovely delicacy as the main painting, that was very informative. I tried it out with the Link paintings actually and it didn’t work, so I kept to the frontal surface, but I used a very rough hessian and tested the process of working with a softer colour. The Link paintings are very much New York colouring. When I realised that I wanted to go from the Link paintings into the Stain paintings, I wanted to work with a much richer field. I was influenced by Ken Noland’s application of strong colour and was interested in using it to its utmost light intensity. Bringing the Stains back to Australia, I had to repaint several of them because they were very much understated once I’d stretched them up in Sydney; they were too soft to hold up. I think that was one of the reasons why I decided to use the spray enamel—I had a lot of the cans of the spray enamel paint left over from the Modulars and I threw those onto the surface to increase the luminosity.

AL/ Can you comment on your choice of oil, acrylic and enamel paints, their application and their effect on the surface?

SB/ I initially used oil because that was the way of working at the time; acrylic was in its early days and I didn’t understand what it could give me. Then I saw how acrylic colour could be used, how much more intense the colour was, how much more luminosity it could give, and acrylics became the norm for my work. The Canto and Persians are similar in style, in that they were flat areas of colour. The Modulars were separate images that became one overall painting joined with screws. Then I became more ambitious in the construction and went into glider plywood and enamel finishes which had to be sprayed in car spraying booths to get that lovely shine, so there was a change from the luminosity of one part of the shape to the flatness of another. With the second period of Stain paintings, I decided to make the whole surface opaque by using a very, very dense surface. Monet changed the way he worked in series, the type of mark that he made, whether it was a more open or closed off area. Pollock mostly manipulated paint with sticks and a process of working brushes, but I wanted that whole release in the process of throwing paint, moving it around with the big squeegee on the end of a handle. There was no brush involved, just the throwing of paint onto the surface. The use of the spray enamel gave me those differences I needed. It was the same with the Modulars—[moving from] the spray enamel surface to the matt-ness.

AL/ How did the move into your expressionist phase occur?

SB/ Lynne Eastaway, my then partner, and I used to go down to Merimbula for the summer holidays, and we’d go out drawing. There’s a beautiful beach just before Eden in the National Park with cliffs coming right down to the sea edge and I’d do studies of the headlands. It’s always in the back of my mind to continue with a series at some stage, just the headlands. I was getting all this information about the landscape, and I wanted to see what was there for me in the painting process. I thought of Monet and his cliff faces. I wanted to get back to making a mark with a brush, to use those images that were in the land, in the way lizards and other animals would leave marks in the sand. I needed to include the figure.

AL/ And then shifting from expressionism back into abstraction?

SB/ I became interested in the deconstruction principle: the setting of this square, angled house in the environment is a natural deconstruction situation. 5 It’s like the first landing [in Australia]. For the first time the right angle was brought into Australia, and that was the moment of total change. My house in the landscape emphasises the start of the destruction of the Australian landscape, no matter how nice the house is. The series I wanted to do was a background of the organic landscape; the main image rectangle was to do with how tree clumps and sections created shapes. The shape started off small within the context of the ground, and then I tried blowing it up in scale and it worked. I was working in oils, and I wanted more colour in that central shape, so I shifted to acrylics within the rectangle. Then I tried painting the ground in acrylics and it lifted the colour. Gradually I began taking out the organic growth in the ground and got to that stage where I blew up the whole image and it was in acrylics and that set the pace of Structures 1.

AL/ What is the origin of the shapes in the recent Structures?

SB/ I wanted a shape that nobody else had worked. I chose abstract architecture. Somebody, like Mies van der Rohem all of a sudden says: ‘Why are we covering all that internal steel work with bricks and concrete? Why don’t we get that internal steel work to the outside?’ That thinking expands on itself and other processes need to change. It’s

not the structure that is important to me, it’s the abstract thinking, which takes it from that point and enlarges it into an area, which again expands on itself.

AL/ Do you destroy much of your work?

SB/ The only ones I destroyed were the Totems on Ancient Ground series (1982-83). Coming out of that colour period into the expressionist area I went back to making a mark, and some of those early works weren’t as successful because I hadn’t reached the natural way of working that I wanted. In the change from the final Stains into the expressionist works I made small paintings to consider how I made the mark. There were a couple of close moments with the Stains. There was a 14-footer, and it wasn’t working, and I got so angry I picked up a bucket of paint and it went ‘whoosh’ on the work, which was leaning against the wall, and it ran and it just worked beautifully. There was another 14- or 15-footer that I got frustrated with and ripped off the stretcher and folded up into small sections. A couple of weeks later I thought, ‘God, what have I done to my poor kid?’, so I unravelled it and it was a lovely painting. I spent a lot of time getting all the creases out, and it ended up in a museum.

AL/ Can you talk about your practice of working in series?

SB/ Artists need to not only visualise what’s happening in their work at a particular time but to keep on expanding that vision. I’ve always known when a series is coming to an end, although in hindsight I wish I’d continued on for a few more Canto, to make them much bigger. I was working in my mother’s back sunroom—I came back pretty skint from New York the first time, and I had to sell my life insurance to pay for the first show at the Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne, so the scale of the work was limited.

AL/ Regarding your titles, some artists with your practice would have called each work Untitled.

SB/ It’s my frustration at not being a poet. I came through the Beat period, and I knew more about the New York poets than the American painters. One of the reasons that convinced me I should go to New York in the first place

Sydney Ball in his Oxford Street studio, Sydney, 1975.Image courtesy the artist, the ABC, andSullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.

was that I was enthralled by Dylan Thomas. I thought the paintings were worth much more than being called Painting One or Painting Two, so I tried to think of words which would link by association.

AL/ How do you see the profession of being an artist?

SB/ I highly value it as a life experience. Very early on somebody asked me a similar question, and I said that if I didn’t paint my toes would curl up and I’d die. I still feel that I need to paint to express how I feel. I can’t do it through words. The older you get you accumulate more medical problems that make it difficult to do other things, but I can still paint and, hopefully, I’ll be able to keep on painting for some time. I’m sorry that I didn’t start earlier. There are other areas I would have liked to be involved in: anthropology, archaeology, and history, something to do with the investigation of humanity. I guess, I can do that through painting.