But the breadth of her vision is undiminished, as is the vigour of her imagery. In recent years, the shape-shifting has arisen from a basis of organic forms, centred on buds, leaves, seedpods and flowers. But these things are suggested, alluded to, rather than depicted or described. Curiously, in its bold designs and flattened forms, its near-geometries and exuberant pat- terns, her style is no less abstract now than in earlier years, though here and there you might recognize a star or the shape of a tree. The fact that her work is always changing, always breaking new ground with a remarkable freshness of perception, is perhaps indicative that she never quite finds what she’s looking for. Perhaps she’ll find it in the next painting – and perhaps that is what drives her on.

In the 1950s, Ayres started working on a large scale, wanting to explore colour and what it could do. She painted then with oil and Ripolin, a French household paint that Picasso among others favoured. She would pour it straight from the tin onto a board and shape it with her hands, or dribble or flick it. A particularly beautiful example of this early work, Cumuli (1959), was the centrepiece of the two-part spring exhibition of Ayres’s work at the Alan Cristea Gallery (31 & 34 Cork Street, London W1) – two-part because they have two separate galleries and one was devoted to a delightful small historical survey of her work, while the other contained her latest canvases and works on paper.

Although it was very good to see the older work again, and be reminded of some of the different aspects of Ayres’s art (if ever a contemporary artist needed a major Tate retrospective, it’s her), it is the latest work, with its achieved simplicity and composure, which paradoxically makes the deeper appeal. Why is this? Perhaps because, despite its crisp-edged form and ap- parent reduction, it actually takes on board the whole of art and life. As she said to me recently: ‘One looks at everything, dear. It’s not just the stuff in the last twenty years, it’s all the paintings. Or it might be a case of pottery. Everything.’ She loves sculpture – Brancusi and Richard Serra are favourites – and has been making her first ventures in this medium since trying it out at art school nearly seventy years ago. The results are two hefty ceramic sculptures, rather like large sexy pots, made to her specifications, and then hand-painted by her. One was placed on view in the gallery and surrounded by her recent woodcuts, which complemented it superbly.