Before 1958
Juvenalia and Early Abstraction

And here is an image with ideas, problems and solutions strikingly similar to those in a work of many years later: this painting from 2003 which sold at the 2011 Tribute show in Calgary.

Many parallels are instantly obvious: the vertical format, the red, yellows and black, and their intensity. They are also both top heavy compositions. But the centres of the pantings are opposite, the early one white, the new one black.

Also, while the figures in the later work are very constructed and the two fields, the white one and the black one behind that, are accumulations of brushstrokes, the early work's figures simply are brushstrokes. And so the watercolour's blacks are forward with us rather than far away back there somewhere.

In both cases the figures are with us instead of in the painting's image space. We see the banal, uninflected watercolour brushstrokes, for example, as being on the surface which we feel is in our space, as the white ground recedes back into imaginary space. The painting becomes a kind of bridge joining our space to an imaginary space and existing in both. These are baroque techniques.

Coincidentally, an analogous effect occurred in the hanging of this 2003 painting at the Wallace Gallery. It was hung in a way that it could only be viewed from outside the gallery. Three works were handicapped in this way and they all sold.