Gillian Ayres OBE

Ayres referred to a work like Sundark Blues as a ‘bloody big painting’ and its size suggests a shift of focus. As the critic Martin Gayford noted: ‘These are pictures vast enough – like a Titian altarpiece – to affect one’s whole environment when in front of them. You are not looking into them; it is more as if you were inside them. At the same time, they are intimate, since you are aware that every mark represents the movement of Ayres’s arm or hand.’