“I just like painting; I wouldn’t know what to do without it.”
Gillian Ayres
Gillian Ayres
In a 1995 interview with The Independent
Newspaper’s Fiammetta Rocco, the British abstract artist Gillian Ayres said, "All
the painting I've liked has always been colour painting. I've found that I
respond to colour more than anything. Do you know that every artist has their
own colour? If I name artists, I start spinning out their colour in my mind. If
I think of Matisse, I'm going to think of red or emerald green. I'm going to
think of those pinks and lemon yellows. But if you said Kandinsky, I'm going to
think of more beetroot red and yellows. And if you said Pollock, I'd say black
and white. Black and white can certainly be colour too."
Ayres decided to become a painter at the age of 13 after seeing a
book featuring the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin,
Cézanne and Monet. As she told Martin
Gayford in 2010, ‘The four who set me off were really bloody good,
they really were. My God! What they could do with painting!” And by the age of
16 she was enrolled at the Camberwell
School of Arts and Crafts. As she said 'I ran away from school when I
was 16. I insisted on going to art school. There was a great fuss about it from
my parents, who were perfectly supportive people, just not in the art world.’
But the teenage Ayers’ will prevailed and she
spent the best part of the next three years under the influence of the Euston
Road painting style. With her preference for a dialogue between colours the
drab gray formalism of the school rankled and Ayres left for Paris a month
before completing the course and taking her final exams. As she explained to
the College
Magazine, “I thought exams were bourgeois, that they didn’t have anything
to do with art. The terrible thing about that” she added “is that later I
became head of painting, and an external examiner but deep down I don’t really like
what I used to do, because you’re examining people at 20, but they can take off
when they are 30 or 40.”
For more than 20 years Ayres earned her
livelihood from teaching. At the age of 51 she was sacked from the Winchester
School of Art, where she was head of painting, due to cuts in the schools funding.
Which in retrospect she mused “They
heaved me out at a good time. Now I'd say, `Thank you'."
Since 1956 hardly a year has gone by when Ayres isn’t exhibiting
somewhere in Britain. Having been able to devote her time exclusively to her art
she has come to earn the accolade of the Grande Dame of British art, painting
during the summer and working on her prints during the colder months.
As she says, “I don't see why you shouldn't be filling yourself
up, making yourself happy. Enjoying yourself. Feasting on beauty. I want an art
that's going to make me feel heady, in a high-flown way. I love the idea of
that. I'd use the word spiritual. I'm not frightened of all that."
Her latest exhibition is currently on show at both of Alan
Cristea’s London Galleries until the 30th of May.
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