Audio Guide Transcript
Gillian Ayres made this work - Distillation - using a combination of artists' paint and a glossy household paint called Ripolin.
Ayres applied the paint onto a huge sheet of hardboard that lay flat on the floor of her studio.
In an interview for this show she's described how she:
"poured paint and pushed it around. I'd even pour turps all over [the board] and see what happened.
I wanted to see what paint would do; I'd go and have a coffee and by the time I came back it'd have moved!"
With this work Gillian Ayres has said that she was trying to answer the question of "what painting is."
There's no particular centre to the painting, she designed it to be "a total experience" - "so that nothing is more important than anything else".
She wanted viewers to look "all over it."
The process of painting itself - as opposed to its subject, or meaning - was under huge discussion in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Film of American artist Jackson Pollock dripping, flicking and pouring paint onto his canvases, laid out on the floor, had reached Britain and his paintings had been shown at the Institute for Contemporary Arts and the Tate Gallery.
And British artists too rejected the figurative paintings, done in drab, muted colours, of the previous generation.
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