Content free (4)

Having decided that this fine pastiche of an early Twombly was not quite good enough to displace one of our existing pictures, 'Content Free 4' has now been found a permanent home elsewhere, that is to say at the back of the garage.

As it happens, with the hardboard glued to the back to hold it together, the pastiche as a whole behaves rather like the bi-metallic strip of the school physics class; that is to say, as it dried out indoors it warped, with the paint side the concave side. The spruce was drying out and shrinking more than the hardboard. There was even a crack to the right, annoying in such a young piece. We shall see how things develop in the damper, cooler air of the back of the garage: I hope for spontaneous repair.

I guess that a more experienced man would have used a wooden frame rather than a sheet of hardboard; something made of a similar if not the same material as the panel and so contrived as to give the panel a bit of room for manoeuvre while at the same time giving it some support & constraint.

Interestingly, the auto-focus on the telephone, usually very good, could not cope with this free hanging picture, which must have been moving around enough to disturb the auto-focus computing. The others which I took at the same time are much worse.