Blue Form on White

In 1961 Scott completed his largest single work, a 46 foot mural commissioned by Eugene Rosenberg for Londonderry’s Altnagelvin Hospital. Re-visiting a non-figurative style formerly explored in the mid-1950s, his work, no longer bound to the horizon line was divided into vertical sections with flat, boldly coloured shapes placed in rhythmic succession against a creamy white background. As a result of working on such a vast scale, his paintings began to take on something of the character of the mural, they not only tended to be larger than those he had made before but seemed also to tease the viewer by appearing visually truncated, suggestive of the fact that the picture might form part of a much larger composition. This certainly seems to be the case in Blue Form on White whose outer lines, far from hemming in seem to encourage an expanded view of the canvas as part of a potential sequence, with sections to the left and to the right allowing us to imagine the possibilities of the painting’s origin and conclusion. The eponymous and electrifyingly exploratory blue protuberance emerging from the left of the canvas is the focal point of the painting. Highly seductive, both formally and aesthetically, Scott’s blue bulge elicits in the viewer a visceral thrill, one feels instinctively that such forms, ‘made to move and animated like living matter’ are imbued with a kind of sensual autonomy (William Scott quoted in exhibition catalogue, The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1955). A tension then is set up as the blue form encroaches on the white, appearing on the verge of colonising the space occupied by two alternately slender and swollen white forms. Abstract and yet anthropomorphic, such curvilinear forms (also repeated in Figure Expanded, 1964) although ambiguous, seem incredibly allusive, reminiscent perhaps of the bulge of a fleshy thigh or of a woman’s breast. In 1963 Scott accepted the offer of a twelve month residency in Berlin with the Ford Foundation and it was whilst in Berlin that Blue Form on White was completed. Sarah Whitfield asserts that ‘Scott must have been familiar with the great collection of Egyptian sculpture to be found in Berlin. The sudden appearance of a female form in works painted in Berlin, suggests that the experience of seeing superb examples of ancient Egyptian sculpture, such as the Standing Striding Figure of Nefertiti, made itself felt in these large compositions’ (S. Whitfield (ed.), op.cit., p 190).