I usually see subjects when I’m walking along, perhaps it might be in a street or somewhere like that. Perhaps when there’s a particular effect of light on; I’ve seen a subject which looked magnificent at one time, and I’ve gone back to it another day, and it hasn’t looked like anything at all. A lot depends on the effect of light; that is why when I’m painting landscape, I prefer a day when there are plenty of clouds rolling around so that you get varying degrees of light, shadows cast across the landscape and that sort of thing.
Back in 1919, de Meistre and I both experimented with abstract act, abstract painting. De Meistre, I think, has perhaps carried this further than I did at the time, but after several experiments, I decided that that wasn’t exactly my line of country, that I needed something of the visual image in my work. And so although from time to time since I have done abstractions, I haven’t exhibited them, I’ve done them more as an exercise because I think the abstract idea is very important from the view of constructive design.
In much of the work of the present day, I find that this constructive idea has rather gone by the board, and that, I think, is not very promising for the future of that kind of work. It’s rather too haphazard, it relies too much on chance and doesn’t bring forth the full creative powers of the artist.
