Alan Reynolds - 9781848220683

It isn't unusual for an artist to find his true voice in mid life. Barnett Newman claimed that he finished his `first painting' on his fifty-third birthday, having already been painting for a quarter of a century. Perhaps especially for artists growing up after the first revolutions of modern art, there was a need to feel their way forward amongst a confusion of options. More unusual is the case of an artist who is loudly celebrated from the outset and who then turns his back on popularity, quietly to pursue his inner convictions.

Alan Reynolds' mid-life crisis came early. For ten years, from 1948, when he was demobbed from the army and entered art school, to 1958, when he stopped drawing directly from nature, he was supremely successful as a landscape painter: `the golden boy of post-neo romanticism in England', as Bryan Robertson described him.

For fifty years he has been an abstract or `concrete' artist. In 1967 he abandoned painting entirely and began to make constructed reliefs, and for the last thirty years he has made only white reliefs, tonal drawings and woodcuts.

Writing about Alan Reynolds, nowin his mid eighties, Michael Harrison can sympathise with Samuel Beckett who had taken on the daunting project of writing on Proust: `I don't know whether to start at the end or the beginning.' Looking back, it's tempting to see an artist's progress as an inevitable and even logical journey. Hindsight is useful, and there is logic to be traced, but this book attempts to recapture Alan Reynolds' life as it was lived, when that logic was not always obvious, nor the choice of route so singular.