to Ben Nicholson

Dear Ben,

But I adore criticism, I am very grateful for it – I get all too little up here. The only person who gives me any is a young Chinaman, Li [Yuan-Chia], - he has exhibited in Rome, Florence and in Signals. He makes things that the spectator participates with – that is large white magnetic panels on which one places wooden circles, to ones liking. When Li places them they have meaning, when other people move them they have none. He said to me yesterday, ‘The way you paint fast what you feel and want to paint, is fine for making a good picture, as you can – but to take the next step and make a masterpiece, you must know what you do not like and what you cannot do – and think, not only feel, “how can one do that?” by painting very slowly. When you are painting what you feel, you can and must paint very fast as you do, when you are painting after that with your thoughts you must paint very very very slowly.

            Which is I suppose what you do – and have always done – and maybe is what you have written to me – and of course ‘Notan’ and the allocating of space are interdependent – and yet, and yet if one thinks of Van Gogh, Matisse, the Eastern colourists, one thinks of blue or yellow or even black, if one thinks of Picasso or Li one thinks of angles, or in Li’s case of circles. In your case one thinks of space in universal terms of scale and great dimension expressed in tones of the smallest dimension – the closest intervals of neutral grey or dove or oatmeal – O yes you sometimes make a joke with a tiny space of cerulean or a spark of vermillion – but often express the greatest dimension with only white. The close proximity of your tones make scale and dimension, they do not make light. Making colour-light and making division of space may be interdependent, but I cannot think of any master who does both with equal emphasis, equal delight – you would have to be two people – at the dame time.

            And I for one could never be a square. I think an engineer could be – or a tennis player. I can’t think of anyone who could be a circle, not even Mrs. Eddy, her American words would jolt out of a circle – perhaps Buddha could become one. But anyone could be a flower – it’s easy, it grows and moves, and enjoys being alive. I am an iris at the moment – an early purple black one with stiff rising petals that have 3 mouths of fire – one for the sun, one for the bees, and one for the wind – that is blowing from the snow-covered hills.

            But where is my reasoning off the mark? What mark?

Winifred.

 

P.S Not of course that you would not make a colourist, if you thought that it would add anything to your span - it would not would it? Anymore it would not add anything to my colout-light if I became a half moon or an ellipse, even if I could - instead of the iris that I am. It would take me the rest of this life to become an ellipse, and I have far too much to do with it, and with two or three other lives if I can be given them, to make the really portentous colour-light that

could be made. And if you say that what I write is still off the mark, may I ask why do not sculptors colour their statues or their abstract forms? etc. etc. etc. etc.