Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Private collection, Sweden

EXHIBITED
possibly Paintings of the Late Ralph Balson, 1960-1964, The third and final Memorial Exhibition, Gallery A, Sydney, 27 May - 14 June 1969

In 1955, Ralph Balson turned 65, retiring from his work as a house painter. He continued to teach part-time at the East Sydney Technical College in Darlinghurst, dividing his time between Sydney and Mittagong, where he maintained a studio in the garden of Grace Crowley's country house, High Hill. This final decade of his life was a more relaxed time for Balson. He filled his days with painting, visiting exhibitions, and reading copiously and broadly (from the latest international art trends to science and metaphysics). It was also a time when his work began to enjoy the recognition from his peers and critics (though still not without some controversy).

In the 1930s and early '40s Balson had taken his inspiration from Piet Mondrian, constructing compositions of pure geometric abstraction with overlapping planes of clear bright tone. Both he and Grace Crowley used coloured tissue paper to map out their complex compositions of overlapping circles, squares and rectangles, balancing cool and warm, giving the illusion of three-dimensional depth. However, by the early 1950s, Balson began experimenting with a more fluid style, initially expressed in a series of pastel drawings. A major turning point came for Balson in 1953 with the exhibition French Painting Today, held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in which the style of Tachisme (from 'tache', the mark or the stain) was featured.

'He (Balson) became increasingly interested in American Abstract Expressionists and at the beginning of the 1960's created a series of free-flowing works in enamel paint described as 'matter paintings', a title which was intended to draw attention to their non-objectivity. 'My Painting', wrote Balson, 'is not associative either of England or Australia, or going for a walk or coming back from one. I try and find out what the substance of paint will give me, to make a painting a 'Matter Painting'.1

Balson's matter paintings were to be his last major body of work. In this example which has been unseen in a private collection in Sweden for many decades, Balson employs his fluid and spontaneous technique of pouring the paint directly on to the board allowing the monochrome shades to infuse and form organic swirls. In his Art and Australia article of March 1965, Daniel Thomas celebrated this final series: "His last statement was 'Instead of the old world of absolute values, ours is a world of relativity, a world of ceaseless movement where reality is nothingness and nothingness reality. Instead of the determinate, the principal of indeterminacy.' He was the enemy of the static, which was dead and a poet of a universal, shifting flux."

1. Andrew Sayers, Australian Art, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001, p. 175