On building a surface

Most of the work in these paintings happens before anything worth looking at appears.

The first layers go down thick and fast, in colours that will almost entirely disappear. They are not composition — they are structure. Heavy body acrylic holds the mark of the knife, and once it cures it becomes a landscape for everything after it to catch on.

Scraping back

The turn comes when I start removing. A blade drawn across a cured surface takes the high points and leaves the valleys, and what surfaces is the colour from three weeks ago that I had forgotten putting there.

You cannot plan the thing that makes a painting work. You can only build a surface that gives it somewhere to happen.

What this means for a collector

These are physical objects, and photographs flatten them. What a screen cannot show you is the way the light moves across an impasto ridge as you walk past it — which is, honestly, most of the point.

If you are considering a work, ask for photographs taken in daylight at an angle. They tell you far more than a straight-on plate ever will.