Ben Luke

Yeah.

Yeah.

I want to ask about the sort of deliberate unorthodoxies that you use in the work.

I've made a list here because I think it's really important.

You're using distemper paint, which is an unusual paint now.

It was used a lot in modernism, for instance, and we can come back to that.

But you deliberately encourage like a Hessian weave, a thick Hessian weave in some paintings.

You're severing parts of paintings and attaching them to others.

You're painting with bleach and varnish.

You're pressing lined index cards into the paint and using their imprint, that sort of thing.

It seems to me that you almost set yourself kind of formal challenges by disrupting your own actions.

Tell us about that.

That's nice.

So it's forms of questioning in a way.

It's an objective questioning of your own practice in a way or your own methods.

I think there's a lovely counterintuitiveness about that.

Like, for instance, I'm thinking of some of the works where you use bleach.

They are absolutely, in a way, the most fragile images.

And one thinks of bleach as an utterly destructive force.

And it really is like household bleach, right?