Ben Luke

It's also about a sort of sensibility or a kind of that somehow Bonnard's part of your artistic makeup and you can call on him almost subconsciously.

Anatomy of the cat.

That's the marvellous thing you can do and you do it a lot in your paintings is that sense in which an object that we know...

can be twisted or stretched in ways that you can only really do with paint, you know, and they become then something else.

I see it sort of transformed, like there is a painting of yours, of course, which is called Dreams of the Everyday, another called Fairly Liquid, where, you know, it seemed to me that those are absolutely squarely responses to Bonnard.

But also there's a painting which you made of the fish, which I know are in an Edinburgh museum, where you really focus on the mosaic.

And that seems to me to, again, have come from those extraordinary depictions of tiles in the Bonnard bath paintings.

So there's ways in which it enters the work by the back door, if you like.

He is indeed.

You had a show recently with Winifred Nicholson, which was in Orkney in Bath.

There was a quote in that catalogue which I thought was really instructive, both about her work and yours, and it talked about how pictures for today's dwelling house must be an anchor of security, must be a lamp for delight, must be a well of peace.

But then also she goes on to say...

about asking it to be a ladder, not a realistic ladder that reaches as far as the ceiling, but one of those upheld in places of stones.

There's something there that I think is about the expectations of painting, which I see in your work too, this idea that it can be, as we were talking about, something that is pleasurable, but it takes us also often to somewhere mysterious, and there's sort of multiple functions of a painting in a way, and you seem to encourage that really well.

through the language and through the imagery.

There's a sense in which we are on a journey and there is great mystery in it.

There's that marvellous painting she did of the bath with the boat that sort of floats, and that spatially is just such an amazing picture, actually.

Yes.

kind of magical realism quality to the thing where the boat yes we read it as on the surface this toy boat but there's something very heightened about it in a kind of way absolutely yeah i wanted to talk about distemper and it makes me immediately think of matisse because i feel like his distemper paintings were so almost programmatic in the sense that he goes to see giotto did he use it a lot he used it in like things like le luxe the great 1907 picture le luxe he's

He's using distemper because he's seen Giotto and he aspires to create a modern form of those kind of fresco paintings.