Lot Essay
Alan Gouk comments on the present work, 'the way in which both the ball and its surroundings are brush-painted, the one writhing inwardly up to its serrated edges, the other crazing open, with incisively directional dabs, allows the contained energy of the orb to spread its effect in a continuously pulsing wave right to the four edges of the canvas, carrying the slashed intervention of a pale violet finger, an orange scribbled dagger in the corner, and causing the scurrying Heifetz-fingered creatures at the right-hand corner to set a merry dance, rasping and sawing as in a devil's trill by Paganini' (Patrick Heron, Barbican Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, London, 1985, p. 22).