THE LONG JOURNEY, 1946
Oil on Board. 8½ x 13¼in. (21.6 x 33.7cm.)
Signed and inscribed on the reverse of the frame with the artist’s name, the title of the work and the Park Hill Road address.
Provenance
Christie’s, London, 29 July 1988, lot 54, illustrated in the catalogue.
Exhibited
London, Mayor Gallery 1947, (paintings) No. 12.
London, Blond Fine Art, 1989.
Literature
Ratcliffe (2007) illus. col, pl 40 purports to be this painting, but is in fact Alcove II (1948).
Two forms, each closely resembling the glass retorts familiar from the laboratories of early chemists and alchemists, are joined by the long, slender neck that they share. They float in space, without external referents, making it impossible to gauge their size, movement or orientation. Are they static, revolving or receding? Are they microscopic, or is the scale cosmic? Are the forms organic, like fruiting bodies or an amoeba in the act of budding, or inorganic - perhaps the birth of a binary star? The thin filaments of paint, squeezed by the decalcomania process, gives the forms a textured surface appearance of a cantaloupe melon or the folds of the cerebral cortex.
Perhaps the title refers to the difficulties in completing the alchemical Great Work.
Retort-like forms occur in other works – see, for example, A Visitation (I) (1945). See also the note to Communicating Vessels (1941).
In a letter to J.F. Hendry (April 17th 1947, University of Glasgow Special Collections MS Gen 549/529) the artist described the colours as: “glaucous under-sea colours, with leaden sky; upper globe-form pale bluish, lower pinkish, becoming a white where they join”.
Reference
Ratcliffe, E. Ithell Colquhoun. Mandrake, Oxford. 2007