Stone Form (Tresco)

Hepworth blurs distinctions of dimensionality through her sculptural handling of the oil and pencil in Stone Form (Tresco). From a swirl of centripetal colour in oil emerges a shape articulated through a few sweeping pencil lines. The parenthetical title, Tresco, helps us to orient the colours as indicative of a fiery sunset over the sea as viewed from Tresco, one of the Isles of Scilly. The form rendered in pencil perhaps takes its shape from clouds over the sea. The looseness of the white paint which Hepworth bounds by her clear pencil strokes transforms them into a distinct form. She celebrates the interaction of organic forms as much in her drawings and paintings as in her sculpture.

The almost architectural precision of Hepworth’s line work recalls her distinctive use of strings in sculpture, which became one of her signatures. Writing about her use of strings in her sculptural works, mirroring the intersecting lines in her paintings, Hepworth described how ‘the strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.’ (the artist, in Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, London, 1952). It has been suggested that drawings like this one explored sculptural forms which Hepworth was not able to realise; indeed, she made only one stone sculpture which incorporated strings, Small Stone with Black Strings, 1952, which is unrelated to the present picture. With oil and pencil, however, Hepworth was freed from the practical difficulties of incorporating strings into stone forms, and could instead allow her vision to unfold unfettered on the page.