Between 1956 and 1964, two principal visual components defined Hepworth’s abstract ‘drawings’. First, a painterly ground was improvised, with warm and cool colours scumbled together to create complex layers with an ambivalent sense of depth and surface. She explained in 1961: ‘When I am making a drawing, I like to begin with a board which I have prepared with a definite texture and tone. I like to rub and scrape the surfaces as I might handle the surface of a sculpture.’ In contrast to her use of flat, opaque colour in drawings of the forties, Hepworth came to treat oil paint as a palpable, translucent medium. Washes of colour alluded to landscapes veiled in mist or cloud, and loaded, gestural brushstrokes of bright colour evoked the interior or exterior faces of massive, impermeable stone structures. Second, the mass of colour and painterly texture was organised and shaped by lines and arcs drawn with singular precision using a hard, sharp pencil. ‘The surface takes my mood in colour and texture, then a line or a curve made on it has a bite rather like cutting into a slate.’

The string-like spiral motif that occurs in many of Hepworth’s drawings suggests a twisting motion. Referring to this as a ‘turning form’, one of her earliest works of this kind was made in 1946. In that coloured drawing, she composed a complex shape with clearly defined contours suspended in silhouette against a pale wash background. She later realised this theme in three dimensions, most notably in the monumental sculpture Turning form (1950) [BH 166] made for the Festival of Britain, which was displayed on an electric-powered revolving plinth. Hepworth liked her sculpture to be shown in a setting where ‘one can enjoy it in all its aspects’; where it might ‘expand and breathe’. Viewed in the round, the personality and inner formal complexity of a sculpture become apparent.

By analogy, in her ‘turning form’ drawings Hepworth explored in two dimensions the complexity of a form seen from multiple perspectives at once—a long-standing device of cubism. In Turning form (blue), three painterly applications of pale colour seem to articulate the exterior faces of a form, while arcing lines span the full height of the tableau and frame a central opening, the depth of which is emphasised by the illusion of recession created by string-like lines. Yet there is no decisive contour to outline the imagined sculptural form. The masses and shapes implied by colour and line are grouped together in a provisional relationship, simultaneously evoking several different positions in actual space. The overlapping shapes and silhouettes in Turning form (blue) are essential to the ‘turning’ movement suggested by the title of the work.

Turning form (blue) relates closely to another drawing of 1960, Turning form (blue on a pink ground), and when taken together they show Hepworth exploring with different palettes the same morphology—a sculptural encasement interconnected by string-like lines.