Cayuga Blue 1975
Acrylic and enamel on cotton duck
Signed “Sydney Ball” and dated 1975 to the reverse
123.0 x 152.0 cm
Provenance Greenhill
Galleries, Adelaide
Self
taught and well travelled, Ball was largely influenced by the New York
School of artists, which included de Kooning, Guston and Motherwell.
After having spent the mid to late sixties in Europe and New York,
Ball returned to Australia “as an influential representative of
hard-edged abstraction”. (McCulloch 1994)
Writing
in the early 1970s, Bernard Smith quotes Ball:“... ‘A colour.
..must be regarded as a structural unit, a spatial unity, a unit of
light or direct sensation, with its own capacity to react aggressively
against another colour. It may even have the capacity for motion. ’ [Smith
goes on]... Ball ’s development has in general conformed to that
of the typical avant-garde painter. He has sought more with less, and
this has certainly kept his art probing at colour problems and alive.” (Smith
1971)
Represented
National
Gallery of Australia
All Australian State galleries and many regional and institutional collections
Museum of Modern Art, New York
References
McCulloch,
Susan 1994, The Encyclopedia of Australian Art, Allen & Unwin,
St Leonards, p.68.
Smith, Bernard 1971, Australian Painting: 1788 –1970, Oxford University
Press, Melbourne, pp.428, 430.
