Ben Luke

Absolutely.

But is it also bound up with memories of Howick?

Yeah.

And incident as well.

I mean, your paintings are full of incident, actually.

Yeah.

Even some of the most sparse paintings that you make, they might have a small figure or object that somehow activates the entire canvas.

And it seems to me that you work quite hard at getting that balance right in terms of activation and stillness, you know.

going its own way if you like you know they're taking a line for a walk yeah yeah it's so important isn't it yeah you know that it has its own life in a way so yeah i turn to him a lot following up on clay there's a painting called something of the night a really beautiful painting from 2021 which i know is based on part of a painting by him you do this a lot right so you sometimes like you mentioned about how you can extract a little part of a broigal or whatever yeah

Often you're working with elements of a painting.

So you won't say take an entire composition, but you will pull from art history particular details.

And I'm wondering if that's often about if you'd like even like sort of fundamental problem solving within a composition or, you know, you don't set out like I am going to take a painting by X and I'm going to make a painting based on it.

Yeah.

You can bring them in.

They're a kind of chorus that you can select from at times.

Another artist I really wanted to talk about was Bonnard, who I know is tremendously important.

And in all sorts of ways, I mean, you see him in your tabletops, which are loaded with objects or fruit, or in the current show that's near to us, there's a sort of floor which has lots of rugby balls or footballs or whatever.

Yeah.

But also, like, for instance, every time I see a cat in your painting, I think about Bonnard's cat in the Musée d'Orsay.

So, you know, again, it's not just about fragments either.