Notes

“Bill [Ainslie] was often bitterly opposed by painters and critics who felt that in the South African context [of the struggle against apartheid] abstraction was ‘opting out’. The attacks never deflected him, because he did not seek to impose his way of painting on others, and because in any case he thought the reverse: that particularly in the South African context, where thought and perception were everywhere channelled and censored, by friends as well as enemies, where there were so many ‘secret guardians’ of the visible as well as what was unconscious, abstraction was ‘the most defiant, most revolutionary way one could possibly paint’. He wrote: ‘We don’t make art in an attempt to change people, we make it to change ourselves, and if it works it will change others by the appeal it makes.’”

Pat Williams