Opposite and Equal

The present work is closely related to Scott's painting Nearing Circles, of which John Russell (Developments in Style, William Scott, London Magazine I, No. 3, June 1961, p. 24) commented: 'The square and circle, never far from Scott's preoccupations, are the basic forms here employed; and, over and over again, the observer who has followed Scott throughout his career will recognize the familiar but now transmogrified motifs - the table and its legs, the rich blackened circle of the frying-pan, the irregular rectangles that could be ships at the quayside, the scribblings and scrawlings that bring the language of the street into the drama of High Art. And, beyond all of these, Scott's concern is where it always was - with proportion, with an emptiness that is alive with incident and interest, and with an enclosed, flattened, up-tilted space that somehow opens out to embrace a great part of our visual experience'.