MdS: On your return from Italy in the summer of 1960 and, prior to that, in your tremendous interest in Seurat, it seemed to me that things were already beginning to germinate relative to your subsequent way of working. Would you agree? 

BR: Well, one of the things I remember about working in Italy at that time was that I started to dismember, to dissect, the visual experience. I tried to analyse the colour of the situation, the form, the linear axes and the tone in quite consciously separate statements. 

MdS: I well remember the separate colour units, almost like considerably enlarged passages from a neo-impressionist picture. If these pointillist-like fragments could have been ‘blown up’ to an even larger scale they would have become entirely optically-operative works. 

BR: You are probably thinking of a painting of a pink landscape based on a view over a huge plain. Now, that was a powerful visual and emotional experience. The heat coming of f that plain was quite incredible. It shattered any possibility of a topographical rendering of it. BR: Because of the heat and the colour reverberations, to be faithful to that experience it was only possible to ‘fire it off’ again in colour relationships of optically vibrant units of colour. It wouldn’t in fact have mattered if those had been black and white, or green and red – the facts of local colour were quite unimportant. The important thing was to get an equivalent sensation on the canvas. 

MdS: Would you say that if there was any relationship between your thoughts at that time and the Futurists, whose work you had then recently seen in Milan, Boccioni for example, it was in the attempt to work out a vocabulary of signs, a vocabulary of marks, a vocabulary of pictorially structural elements, which, when brought together, would evoke certain states of feeling or states of mind – not descriptively in the usual illustrative manner but symbolically? 

BR: Yes, it is a question of substitution. As Cézanne said, painting is a parallel to nature and the expressive quality comes through the structural means, through honouring both. 

MdS: Would you say that it is this that links your work in the pictorial field with the idea of serialism in modern music – the attempt to control all the constituent parts of the compositional process by employing extremely disciplined means in a fully free and expressive way? 

BR: Yes, I think serialism is a very good parallel because in the early phases of working on an idea, I might for example choose a unit, say an oval, and I ‘pace’ this unit, as I call it. I put it through its paces, I push it to the fullest extent where it loses, or almost loses, its ovalness, its oval characteristics. I see, so to speak, what an oval will do. 

MdS: Do you do this in your mind or do you actually materialise it on paper? 

BR: I do it physically because there is no possible way of doing this purely conceptually. 

Image: Untitled [Study with straight curves], 1965, gouache, pencil and ink on paper