To accompany the first of two exhibitions at the Arra Gallery, Mousehole, Cornwall: Exhibition of Drawings and Constructions by Marlow Moss, 17 February — 17 March 1949, Moss wrote:

I would like to ask the public to look at the work, as free as possible from preconceived ideas on art. These drawings are constructed on a very simple principle - a geometrical figure - sometimes broken, sometimes cut, sometimes divided, sometimes sub-divided - until the relation of the lines to each other produce an aesthetic emotion.

If one considers the lines in these drawings as sounds (note or chord progressions) and geometrical figure as the musical key, one can, to a certain extent, compare these drawings to music.

Music is the "art of combining sounds with a view to beauty of form"; this work aims at "beauty of form" by coordinating form and line on the plane.

Quoting from Plato. .... what I understand by beauty of form is, something characterized by straight lines and circles, surfaces and solid bodies composed with the straight line and the circle by means of the compass, the set-square and the plumb. For these forms are not like the others (natural forms), beautiful under certain conditions, but they are always beautiful in themselves. .... - Marlow Moss, 1949.

It is not known if this drawing was included in the exhibition.

In form, this drawing can be seen to relate to a lost sculpture (recorded in my catalogue as Sculpture Construction 2) shown in a black and white photograph from a collection bequeathed by Moss's great niece Hazel Rank-Broadley to the Tate Archives, London, in 2018. Both have the feeling of movement that Moss sought.

-Lucy Howarth