David Batchelor's Monochromes

Found Monochromes of London Vol.1 #22, David Batchelor (1997-2003)

"The monochromes I started making began life as paintings, gradually turned into reliefs and then, after a few years of flailing around, ended up on the floor as objects. The first ones were black. They turned white over time, became silver for a while and occasionally went red – out of embarrassment I suspect. And all the while there was this nagging question: if the monochrome was so simple, why was this all taking so long? In retrospect, I realise one of my many difficulties was I had an idea of what I wanted without any obvious sense of what these things might actually be made from – which is only a problem if you are working in a studio surrounded by materials of one kind or another, and with some space to fill in an as yet unspecified and perhaps entirely imaginary gallery. Which is another way of saying that in art ideas are often much tidier creatures than objects. And then, to cut a rather long and very dull story short, at some point in the early 1990s my monochromes tripped up on a couple of readymades and stumbled into some colour. And in the process they began, just possibly, to have a life of their own, rather than one I had dreamed up for them."

from here.

""The monochrome is a subject that has interested me for a long time, partly because it's the dumbest form of painting that could possibly exist. Anyone can make a monochrome: it really doesn't require craft or skill of any kind at all. The difficult thing is how to make a good one, or an interesting one. How do you make a monochrome that isn't like every other monochrome. That always seems to offer the problem for the studio"."
from here