Ben Luke

It's domestos that you're using, right?

Yeah.

But I'm thinking of that work, which is based on a photograph taken by, you think maybe taken by Dylan Thomas, which appeared in a book by his wife, right?

And it's basically the most fragile of all.

It's almost not there.

And yet you've achieved it through this utterly destructive force.

And that sort of counterintuitiveness seems to be something you enjoy in a way.

Yeah, yeah.

You told Peter Doig in the marvellous conversation that I urge all our listeners to read that my subject, if I were to choose a single overarching subject, is something like history.

But it's history with a small h rather than a capital H in some ways, isn't it?

Yeah.

And it seems to me that, of course, history is deeply related to memory, and there you perfectly and beautifully express that there.

But there's so much, it seems to me, about the texture of memory in your paintings.

And one of the ways we see it is through the recurring images and the way that they're subtly morphed through the bodies of work so that an image that we see reoccurring is somehow transformed through the act of painting into something else, even though...

the original image is clearly the same.

I'm thinking, for instance, of the tent paintings where you have this triangle, this insistent triangle, and you might have a fried egg on a stove outside or whatever, or you have a distant view to a landscape or something.

That's clearly based on a memory or an evocation of something you experienced.

And yet it's transformed every time you do it in subtle ways.

And it seems to me that connects deeply to that idea of a kind of history, a personal history.

Yeah.