Six Identified Forms

The present work belongs to Callum Innes’s Identified Forms series, begun in 1990, in which images are created through a process of removal rather than addition. A related work from the series, Six Identified Forms (1992), is held in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. The vertical drips that characterise this series tread a line between presence and absence. While the cascading drips appear spontaneous, Innes carefully produced these by guiding turpentine down the surface in fine rivulets. The solvent dissolves the dark painted ground, revealing the canvas beneath and creating luminous vertical passages that seem to emerge from within the picture itself.