'Feast or famine' is the cliché that springs to mind to describe the dramatic emptying out of Caulfield's pictures in the late 1980s and early 1990s after his prolonged involvement woth a surfeit of styles and images. Perhaps after bingeing with such intensity, his appetites were sated and a period of fasting was called for. But some professionals can ascribe a more prosaic and practical reason for the sudden about-face: that the paintings had become too labour-intensive, too slow to make, and another way had to be found to direct the eye around the composition that did not necessitate covering every square inch of the surface with fine detail executed with small brushes.
The changes that occurred in his art during this few years, subtle at first and more radical by the end of the decade – in the expanded scale, radical simplification and new sequential systemof composing manifested in large canvases can be ascribed to a consious desire to reinvent the terms of his art.
Trou Normand, 1997
Trou Normand, the French term appropriated by Caulfield for this bar interior, loterally translates as ‘Normandy hole’ but it refers to the glass of Calvados drink halfway through a meal in order to revive the appetite. Having just visited the Royal Academy’s exhibitionof the late work of Georges Braque(1882-1963), who divided his time between Paris and Normandy between 1931 and his death in 1963. Caulfield amused himself with the thought that the phrase could also
