Standing Form: Hot Summer Room

'People ask me about my 'Standing Forms'. What do they mean? They do not of course mean anything. The forms are based on the principles of organic growth, with which I have always been preoccupied. To me they are monuments and presences. But why use these forms instead of human figures? Because, at the moment, I find it necessary to catch the taste - the quality - the essence of the presence of the human figure: the mysterious immediacy of a figure standing in a room, or against a hedge in its shadow, its awareness, its regard, as if one had never seen it before - by a substitution. I find at the moment that I can make these qualities more real to myself in this way. It happens that I find these organic forms best for my purpose. They themselves are emotionally modified from their natural prototype. They give me a sense of the shock of surprise which direct evocation could not possibly do. Also, in these pictures I am trying to return to these forms after drastic rearrangement and emotional and formal modification to the field of purely visual response - to throw them back as it were, into the original cradle of impact. Seurat did this in his Baignade and the Study for Grande Jatte in the late Lewisohn's collection; today one must use other methods and other ways'

(Graham Sutherland quoted in The Listener, 6 September 1951)