Scarba, 1980
Oil on hessian
Signed lower left. Signed, titled and dated, verso
122.0 x 122.0 cm (48 x 48 inches)

Provenance:
Knoedler Gallery, New York

Notes:
"Ayres invents visual-tactile worlds whose features are summoned by automatic gesture, and where the marks this made have no specifically referential purpose. Theirs is not the natural space of pond or garden, but a space for the play of the eye, the mind and the imagination, the space of the painting itself, an abstract metaphor for the space of the world."
(Mel Gooding, 'Gillian Ayres', Lund Humphries, London, 2001, p. 122)
When confronted by an abstract such as Scarba it is always tempting to search for recognisable forms, for references to nature or to previous works in order to provide a key that will help decipher the 'meaning' of the painting. At first it appears that Gillian Ayres' habit of choosing place names as the titles of her works (in this case, Scarba is an island off the west coast of Scotland) assists the viewer in their search. However, no clue is intentionally offered, her paintings are, 'purely abstract in the sense that they represent no recognisable forms or actual spaces; those we descry in the paintings are of our own making and intrinsic to the experience the paintings offer the eye'.
Scarba from 1980, is one of the paintings that marks Ayres' shift from her complete rejection of subject matter in the 1970s to the development of the brightly coloured, clearly discernible forms that characterise her work through the mid 1980s to the present day. This breakthrough was prompted by her 1976 visit to New York where she encountered the art of Hans Hofmann, then virtually unheard of in England. Hofmann's direct engagement with the colours and forms of the surrounding world resulted in paintings that overwhelmed Ayres with their colour, vitality and variety. On returning home she replaced her acrylics with oils, which immediately imbued her painting with a subtlety of touch and colour absent from previous works. Scarba shows clearly the amount of toll that was required by the new technique. The thick crusts of paint took time to accumulate, often building up over a number of years, a stark contrast to the work of the 1950s and 60s when oils were used thinned and diluted, impulsively struck over the canvas.

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