Gillian Ayres

Although Gillian Ayres developed a parallel reputation as a printmaker, producing graphic works that were as radiant as her paintings, it is interesting to note that she never seems to have produced drawings, either as preparatory studies for larger works or as independent exercises, preferring instead to compose her pictures directly on the canvas. One writer has noted of Ayres that ‘the major element of [her] paintings is a passion for colour, for paint and the modelling of paint. This is a vision of the world as flesh as paint. Both the colour and materiality of paint are emphasised, placing the evidence of the physical process of painting continually before us – the smears and twists of arm and hand.’

In the 1990s, Ayres began to incorporate more geometric shapes and patterns into her work, creating a series of paintings that explored anew the relationship between form and colour. The present work, dating from 1993, was inspired by a visit to Provence, where Ayres stayed with the painter Frederick Gore. She had met Gore while studying at the Camberwell School of Art in the early 1950s, and Gore later hired her as a teacher during his time as head of the painting department at the Saint Martin’s School of Art, a post to which she eventually succeeded. Despite their considerably different approaches to painting - Gore was very much a figurative and landscape painter - they remained close friends throughout their lives, and Ayres wrote the foreword to the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition of Gore’s work at the Royal Academy in 1989. 

In works such as this, Ayres celebrates the sheer physicality of paint, using thick coatings of colour and large brushstrokes to create progressively distinct yet never wholly figurative shapes. (As the artist remarked in 1995, ‘Shapes. Spaces. It’s the way I see the world.’) As Gooding has commented, ‘It hardly needs saying that Ayres has an extraordinary technical mastery of her art. She works in diverse media and with perfect decorative control at every scale, from the miniature…to the mural…she is a supremely gifted colourist, able to work with the brightest and most intense chromatic primaries and the most subtle of soft tonalities, with the drama of black and white, the sonorous minor keys of magenta, blue, purple and maroon and the most acidly sharp yellows, greens and oranges, and to deploy them together with a seemingly effortless bravura; she has an inexhaustible repertoire of stroke, shape, form and motif.’

Among stylistically comparable works by Gillian Ayres of the same date and technique is a painting in the Jerwood Collection.