Long Wall I and Mnemonic 1967-1968
In 1967 neither the tachist improvisations I had been painting since 1964 nor the Daumier/Rembrandt expressionisms I had been making since leaving art school in the early 1950s, no longer seemed to be worth the doing. What could compare with the life and rich detail we were accustomed to in the cinema? Not the kind of paintings I was doing anyway.
The camera moves, the people on the screen move - "It moves" as Galileo said. In 1967 I was drawing story-boards for films I might, one day, make. These drawings gradually began to turn into paintings and soon I realised that the style, the medium was unimportant, that a film could flip from 'Donald Duck' to 'Gone with the Wind', from Oz to Potemkin with never a thought to the characteristics of acetate. Painting could be like that.
So these first ones were more like the pin-boards, display cases, street posters, or cabinets of curiosities. Collage was OK!
