Muddy hands mark a blank surface.This ‘primitive’ gesture is followed by rationally drawn lines repeating the previous movement. From the beginning the work deals with opposite forces which stay harmoniously together. Chance and absence of design are contrasted with decision and action over it. The shapes made by parallel lines have a kind of pulsation as a latent action. The lines are made in a regular sequence of gestures, as a dance of which we can see only the traces; this rhythm is recorded on the surface. The energy is distributed equally and symmetrically. The body’s marks are the first pattern to be followed and one of the determinants of the work. With the body as a factor of proportion the resulting shapes are in equilibrium.

The process of repeating just a few elements results in work whose essence is clarity. Simple gestures, movements and lines are repeated to constitute a unity. Every line is meant to be as similar as possible to the previous one; however, this act produces small variations which are also part of the process.The movement is repeated but never identical, as a breath that is constant but never the same.

The choice of non-processed materials like mud and crude oil is related to the choice of pure and basic elements.The colours derive from the nature of the chosen material and the place where it was found rather than from any pictorial decision, as the drawings result from simple movements rather than from any descriptive activity.

The repetition of simple elements may suggest a purely minimal approach to making pictures. In these works, however, the variations and accidents of chance give each work a life and nature of its own.

Maria Lucia Cattani 1994

I use ordinary materials; those discarded from industry and those found in nature. I have used mud, engine oil, soot, differential oil (a very sickly smell) and the tar found on beaches.

I wanted to make pictures which had little to do with anything (I thought) except the movement of my hand, arm, body and the repetition of gesture – the only things one can be certain about.The pictures develop a rhythm of breathing and grow as nature. In tracing my line across the surface, I assert my presence and space in the same way (perhaps) as a young child making its first drawings. Sometimes the repetition leads almost to a trance, like the rhythm of a drummer or the repeated steps of a dancer.

The starting point for the pictures is the scale of the body: the height of one’s reach, the stretch of the arms, and the movement of limbs.There is no intended illusion of scale.The pictures are as big or small as the body and gesture that makes them.

They are not pictures ‘of ’ anything. They are records of an activity – the repeated movement of the human body – traces of movement through time.The arm rotates on its axis, or is disciplined in horizontal or vertical activity. Very few decisions have to be made – where to start, where to finish, when to reload the brush, whether to compensate for the irregularities which may occur, for instance in the drawing of a circle, or to let the shapes grow organically according to elements of chance.

I seldom know how a picture will look before I start. A few simple ‘rules’ are fixed - then it is simply a matter

of ‘performing’ the picture. It is always a surprise at the end, and the same rules can be repeated over again with different results.

Nick Rands 1994

If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are - that is all the space I need as a painter.

Willem de Kooning.What Abstract Art MeansTo Me. 1951

Why have I blackened my square with a pencil? Because it is the humblest act the human sensibility can perform.

Kasimir Malevich

If the supply of working materials runs out, go down to

the beach and make lines in the sand with a bamboo stick, draw on the dry ground with a stream of piss, draw in the empty air the pattern of birdsong, the sound of water and wind and cartwheels and the humming of insects, and let the wind and water sweep it all away afterwards, but act from the conviction that all these pure devisings of my mind will magically and miraculously find an echo in the minds of others.

Joan Miró

 .... I have always maintained that you did not need complicated and expensive apparatus to produce a work of art. You could go in the back yard and scrape up some mud and put it on some board the builders had left behind.

Roger Hilton 1974