William Scott, R.A. (1913-1989)

During the course of the 1950s, when many British artists were turning towards abstraction, Scott also became interested in giving his pictures a life of their own and in absorbing objects into their pictorial structure. Although his works always referred to objects, they bear only a distant resemblance. Tabletops are tipped forward into the picture plane and kitchen utensils are flattened; very often the paintings consisted of arrangements of squares, oblongs and ovals of colour. Although he worked with a limited vocabulary of forms he achieved a surprising variety of effects through his concern with the division of spaces and forms, and through his inventiveness as a colourist: moving from black and white to a range of burnt orange and vibrant blues.

The formal concerns of the composition took precedence over the original still life subject of the work. The arrangement of colour and shape and the texture of the paint surface are the important factors.