Skydiver II
Catalogue No. 19
Artist's CR 015
1963
New York
Oil on canvas
70 x 60 inches / 178 x 152 cm
Collection: Private Collection, Italy
Skydiver II is important only because it was a first discovery of the formal yet free compositional possibilities of the skydiver as an image. The article on skydiving, from which the photograph used for this painting was taken, provided images which were used and re-used right up to the time of the first metal paintings.
The painting was worked at slowly and lacked a strong primary conception - the general lines of the composition are cliché-ridden and the helmet is highly unsatisfactory. It was accompanied by Skydiver I which was even more unsatisfactory and which I later destroyed.
'Aspen Notebook', Gerald Laing, unpublished manuscript, 1966