Antony Donaldson (b. 1939)

‘In the summer of 1962 I started the painting Gypsy Rose which turned out to be the first of a series of cut-out paintings. I had just finished Strip Board, a piece with three images of a girl painted on board and inserted into a wooden frame, like the publicity photos outside a Soho strip club. For Gypsy Rose I transferred a drawing I had done of Gypsy Rose Lee, the American burlesque and striptease artist, onto three-ply with the idea of cutting it like a jigsaw so that each piece could be painted a flat colour. I was looking for ways of painting up to an edge. Using three-ply wood and a fretsaw, the problem was the wood splintering at the edges. Time was pressing to complete the work for my first show at the Rowan Gallery in London, so I used a version of the image for a small painting on canvas and the present Gypsy Rose cut-out was finished after the show. All the rest of the cut-out series that were made over the next two years used fibreboard, which gave a clean edge when cut.' (Private correspondence with Antony Donaldson, May 2018).