GERALD LAING

Selected Citations and Comments

Next I began to prune away the painted background and let instead the real environment of the piece begin to play this role. I had always thought of paintings as objects in the environment rather than as framed windows into another world, and to stress this point usually the edges of the canvas were painted as well as the front. But at this point the dynamism of the shape of the canvas began to supersede the dynamism of the image it bore and, indeed, in many cases this outline shape implied far greater volume than did the painted surface. More flat space too, is drawn into, and becomes part of, the painting than the mere painted acreage.

Gerald Laing, 1971: Gerald Laing, exh. cat., Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1971