Statement by Antony Donaldson:

 

In 1964 we were lent a villa in Sainte-Maxime for the end of the summer. London mostly grey, with little street life as yet and “the Swinging Sixties” barely nascent, was left behind. We drove down the west coast of France to Royan to see the location of Peter Brook’s film Moderato Cantabile. (Such was our youth that two years later we drove across the States guided by song titles, Charleston, Chattanooga, Memphis, Santa Fe et al.) It was just after the advent of French Cinema’s “Nouvelle Vague”, which had a powerful effect on us both. So arriving in the South of France in the host sun with our tiny boys was an incredible shock. Mostly we drove around the bay to St Tropez which was a world away from London at that time, open air restaurants, large yachts in the harbor, jazz everywhere and many girls sunbathing nearly nude.

 

Summershot was the first painting I started on our return. A celebration of the difference. Lots of horizontal lines for the sand, sea and sky with a naked girl posing, held together in an emblematic structure, shades of holiday postcards and posters. At this time I was trying to make the paintings more abstract, less of a visual possibility with only the lips an accent of realism. Before we left London I had finished a series of black-and-white paintings encouraged in part by the early “New Wave” films such as Les 400 Coups (1959), Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), A Bout de Souffle (1960), Jules et Jim (1962) and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1962). I was always interested in the cinema and the persistence of vision. At this time most Hollywood films were Technicolor narratives. Suddenly here was a cinema about life that you could relate to your own, real as opposed to unreal, with literate and intellectual references.

 

The last painting I finished before leaving France was called Bring it to Jerome (1964). Summershot, I now realize, was that painting turned inside out. The differences between the two were summed up by what had happened in France. Finding myself eating out, on the beach in open air, constantly saturated with vibrant colour, stimulated a return to colour from black and white, the image of the girl from underwear to nude, and the heraldic form from empty to illusions of space.

 

 

From notebooks written during the 1960s, reproduced in: ALZURI, Miriam (coord.), British Pop. Exhibition catalog. Bilbao: Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2005, p. 413.