Between D and D: Rites of Passage

Between Discipline and Desire is the name Naylor gave to a long series of works which occupied him in the seventies and eighties. As the title suggests, Naylor experienced a conflict between emotions, as the germ of a work, and the need to discipline these emotions by rational consideration of the best way to express them. This tension is the central enabling force in his work and results in an edgy, graphic style and a stressed atmosphere in which colour symbolism plays a major role. Symbolic shapes and devices such as the blue oval, which Naylor regards as a fertile, 'feminine' presence, and the red and black cell-like pattern, recur throughout the series, although as a portrait this work is untypical of the canon.