Painting

Discussing Scott's paintings from 1959, Ronald Alley writes 'One of the results of working on such a vast scale was that his easel pictures themselves began to take on something of the character of mural paintings. They not only tended to be larger than those he had made before, but their shapes were often cut off by the edges of the composition in such a way as to suggest that the picture was a section of a larger field. An affinity to Egyptian wall paintings can be seen in some of the works of 1959/60, especially in those with an arrangement of flat shapes in tiers one above another; but with the increasing clarification of his style and the use of a very small number of simple forms and large expanses of colour the treatment came closer to those of American painters like Rothko and Newman. Instead of lozenges of colour there were usually irregular variants of the square and the circle - shapes floating in surrounding areas of emptiness. Yet despite an almost geometrical division of the picture surface, these were not, were essentially not, geometrical paintings. Their special character came from the unpredictable, exploratory edges of the forms; from the asymmetrical compositions with their suggestions of movement and tensions, their nearly unstable equilibrium; and from the handling of the paint itself, the contrasts of fat paint and thin paint, of areas of uniform paint texture with others which were blotched and scored and encrusted' (see R. Alley, William Scott, London, 1963).