'The actual touch and the way I put paint on canvas matter very much… I am extremely interested in textural qualities – the thick paint, the thin paint, the scratched lines, the almost careful-careless way in which a picture’s painted. I don’t like a picture painted with too much know-how.'
William Scott quoted in: Alan Bowness, Ed., William Scott: Paintings, London 1964, p. 11

Scott was a leading figure in an important group of post-War British painters including Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and Alan Davie who were challenging the avant-guard and pushing the boundaries of painting. These artists shared a dialogue with their counterparts in the United States, whose work Scott witnessed first-hand in 1953. During his visit to New York, he met some of the city’s most prominent figures: Rothko, de Kooning and Pollock. Six years later Rothko returned the visit, staying with Scott in Somerset. Scott was also to meet the gallerist Martha Jackson, who would exhibit his work alongside Francis Bacon and Barbara Hepworth in 1954 followed by several solo shows over the following years. Jackson was introduced to Scott’s work by James Sweeney, the influential curator of MoMA who said of Scott: “At last, England has a painter!” (James Johnson Sweeney quoted in: Sarah Whitfield, Ed., 'William Scott: Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings', Vol.2, London 2013, p.18).

Scott was greatly moved and encouraged by the experience of the art he saw in New York: ‘it was not the originality of the work, but it was the scale, audacity and self-confidence – something had happened to painting’ (Scott, quoted in Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004, p.109). The experience of the monumental and impulsive style of the New York School, resulted in Scott’s paintings growing bigger and bolder. Scott though did not forgot his pre-war European influences (he founded a painting school in Brittany in 1939) or the figuration for which he was so well known. The result was a style that was entirely Scott's own: that blended the traditions of European art with the vanguard of twentieth-century America, and hovers between figuration and abstraction.

In ‘Orange and Red no.2’ distorted shapes float through a hot tangerine vacuum rich in varied textures that calls to mind Rothko's more colourful canvases. The bottles, pots and domestic tableware that populate many of Scott’s more figurative works are only just recognisable in some of the rhomboid forms that shimmer and float across the canvas. Scott said of his work at this pivotal time: 'My pictures now contained not only recognisable imagery but textures and a freedom to distort'. The appeal of these works is Scott’s ability to combine figurative and abstract with such apparent ease, and allowing the viewer to choose whether to keep or forget the associations of the objects and their settings.

This work is the product of an artist at the height of his powers and brimming with executional acuity and creative verve. Scott kept it in his collection until the 1970s, a testament to the importance he attached to this impressive painting which has been in an important International collection since 1996.