Signs Orange and Ochre is a large format painting, made at the high watermark of painterly abstraction in Britain after the Second World War. The palette is pared back, consisting principally of just three colours: yellow ochre, orange and white. The surface is sharply divided into panels of flat colour, made vivid by the unevenly applied and reworked surface of paint. The top and bottom rectangles of ochre are divided by a central band of orange, which is itself cut into with a central division, an uneven circle on the left-hand side and an uneven ‘X’ on the right-hand side. The lower rectangle includes panels of white, the lightness and partially cropped contents of which suggest a window through to a space behind the canvas. The handicraft application of paint and the unevenness of the lines dividing up the surface are carefully judged: they invest the painting with a humane flexibility, in stark contrast to the exacting geometry and unbroken smoothness of contemporaneous constructivist art.

The painting’s titular reference to ‘Signs’ suggests its epigrammatic content. The uneven circle and ‘X’ in the painting are perhaps a playful translation of ‘noughts and crosses’ into a grand, painterly format. By referring to ‘signs’, Scott allows for a variety of external referents without specifying any one in particular. He always retained in his work a field of reference to visible, external reality. He often started with elementary objects, retaining their silhouette or a sense of mass. He then proceeded to deepen the formal qualities of the original subject, using an improvised process of execution through which shape, volume and colour were intensified and translated from ‘visual reality’ into the terms of the painting. In relation to the artist’s use of signs, Sarah Whitfield wrote in the catalogue raisonné of Scott’s paintings:

"Scott’s earliest experience of signs – primarily the chalk patterns made by children’s games on the pavements and walls of Greenock – made him particularly receptive to patterns and signs found in art outside the Western canon. For instance, a postcard found amongst Scott’s papers suggests that the strong colours and patterns of African pottery in the British Museum interested him as much as the collection of Egyptian limestone reliefs."

Scott’s response to contemporary American painting of the late fifties and early sixties was central to the high point achieved in British abstract painting between 1955 and 1965. Writing in 1976, the historian of modern art Alan Bowness described how:

"There was a tremendous mood of confidence in British art at that time, a great wave of enthusiasm which affected everybody from the older generation of Nicholson and Moore to the youngest still at art school. I suppose this was the result of the final realization that French art was not inherently superior to British, and at that time there was not that depressing subservience to American art that has replaced French dominance today."

Signs Orange and Ochre, painted in 1962, is inflected with that mood of confidence. The painting’s bravura execution included inventive and unconventional methods of handling the paint. Several of the shapes are not created with directly applied marks, but were rather made using a negative process of scraping away existing paint to reveal the colour of underlayers. Scott adopted this method in several other works of the earlier sixties, including White, Sand and Ochre, which also includes the ‘X’ form used in Signs Orange and Ochre. The combination of scraping and yellow ochre colouring was a common feature of this period in Scott’s work, and other works that use it include Yellow Matrix (1962, Fermanagh County Museum).