Rethinking the Image

Image source: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/yellow-balance-38422 (Accessed: 20 September 2025). © The Estate of John Tunnard/DACS, London

John Tunnard, Yellow Balance (1937), Leeds Art Gallery, 24 cm x 33 cm, oil on board.

See also: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/red-and-black-balance-38420 (Accessed: 20 September 2025).

John Tunnard, Red and Black Balance (1939), Leeds Art Gallery, 30.6 cm x 76 cm, oil and pencil on board.

John Tunnard was a British modernist painter whose abstract works took inspiration from a variety of sources, accumulated throughout his varied life. These influences included weather, landscapes, music, technology, and natural science – all evident in his oeuvre of intricate, enchanting, idiosyncratic abstract paintings^[1][2][3].

Leeds Art Gallery is home to a considerable number of Tunnard’s paintings, many of which are displayed alongside paintings and sculptures from other notable British modernists. Tunnard’s works, while usually small and discreet, are loaded with detail and nuance, inviting careful examination.

In the context of the Tunnard paintings on display at the gallery, and of the artist’s work as a whole^[3], Yellow Balance and Red and Black Balance are unusual in their two-dimensional configuration, drawing more from Tunnard’s interest in music and technology than his appreciation of three-dimensional, outdoor space. They are manifestations of the manufactured world, rather than the natural world; they are precise and geometric, rather than fluid and organic.

Both paintings include large fields of colour – usually solid and opaque, occasionally textured and translucent – which are intersected by various arrangements of line and shape. Although not directly representational, objects from the real world can be perceived in these configurations – the black portion of Red and Black Balance resembles the headstock of a guitar, while the three-dimensional trapezoid at the base of Yellow Balance resembles a metronome.

Similarly, the lines of Yellow Balance suggest a set of weighing scales, or perhaps the rigging of a sailing boat^[4], while the large translucent shape in the centre of Red and Black Balance bears a strong resemblance to an artist’s palette, and is intersected by a thick diagonal line which resembles a paintbrush.

Both paintings evoke feelings of precision and exactness that suggest finely tuned pieces of apparatus, but which also reflect the level of accuracy that would have been required of Tunnard in his formative career as a textile designer^[2]. They could, therefore, be interpreted as comments on the artist’s own craft, perhaps representing the work of Tunnard as a draughtsman as well as an artist.

Red and Black Balance and Yellow Balance may at first appear simplistic in their two-dimensional configuration and their use of solid colour, but as their complexities and intricacies reveal themselves, they form an assembly of components that work together in perfect harmony, bringing together many of Tunnard’s varied interests.

[1] National Galleries Scotland (no date) John Tunnard. Available at: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/john-tunnard (Accessed: 20 September 2025).

[2] Peggy Guggenheim Collection (no date) John Tunnard. Available at: https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/artists/john-tunnard/ (Accessed: 20 September 2025).

[3] Art UK (no date) John Tunnard. Available at: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/search/actor:tunnard-john-19001971/page/3 (Accessed: 20 September 2025).

[4] This reading seems particularly reasonable when the lines are viewed in combination with the two circular holes, or eyelets, through which they appear to be threaded.