Page 20 - Richard Kenton Webb: Vol.5

in great detail your manifesto of art and teaching. But as ever, when
I looked at the drawings I couldn’t really see any of this. What they
showed me, was what your work has always shown me, a love song
to the other. The Everyman figure, who is really you, stood in a forest
or on a sea shore looking out waiting attentively, listening out to hear
the word of the Other. Or the couple, living together, loving together,
won der ing together, demon strating what a relationship is, where we
realise that instead of existing as two separate ‘I’s’, we can and must
exist as ‘we’, united in our embodied humanity. And that is what Albers
talks about–that the vibra tion that occurs at the meeting point or bound -
ary of two colours is not just a proof of life but of love. And that takes
us back to some of the very first landscape paintings you made at the
Royal College, which you saw as love songs to your friends.

RD I think one of the profoundest things an artist can do is to paint their
Holy of Holies, and for me that is Love. It is an invisible presence and
yet a force that has substance, just like light and colour.