I work a picture very hard and for a long time, sometimes a very long time — years. For me it isn’t about seeing a thing and painting it. It is about finding that thing in the active paint and seeing it in the work with total, sudden clarity, likely in surprise and desperation. This thing must be real — and it must be new and alive, with some actual living quality and intelligence. If it is a picture of a human being then the paint must take on flesh. All this is fleeting and momentary. It is like finding and losing and finding again a single grain of sand in your mouth with your tongue, over the course of maybe a year. And so it has all become very impure and nothing to do with any independence from reality and more to do with finding it. It is a kind of search and in it and amongst the uneven bracken of months of paint eventually forms or associations give rise to figuration, all out of impurity and all that material. Sometimes the clarity is frightening. You have to go a long way for any of this but eventually these braids of paint and these horrible twisted knots — they either start to hold in them objects and they become something or they are elusive, even recalcitrant in their refusal to commit to matter. If you can call that a process, that is mine. Painting hard at this object until things appear in the muck and then pushing that right to its furthest possible extremity until it is an image.