The brief and the plan

QED Studios in Birmingham commissioned me to be the sole artist providing art for the walls of their new office space. After establishing that I didn't do "interior design", I'm not sure what they expected, never having worked with an artist before. The only brief was "I want all my clients who come here to say 'WOW!'." On the one hand this was too open to be useful but on the other hand it meant that the owner was trusting enough to let me just get on with whatever it is an artist does.

The space is divided into many small rooms but with a large atrium and reception area. I knew I wanted to paint directly on the walls but also wanted lots of hangable works to put in each of the rooms. There was something already there from the first meeting, something about proof, about argument, about rationale, about explanation and understanding. It took two weeks of wandering around, sketching, reading to come up with the complete plan.

I'd make a mural which looked like a conversation. It would seem to argue back and forth between understanding painting as a rational, systematic venture and understanding it as an arational, unpredicatable, skirting-on-the-edge-of-vacuity sort of thing. The mural would be an example of its own debate. To provide props for the arguments (I see them as lemmas or propositions in a proof), all the other pieces would supply their own piece of evidence. The viewer/reader should be able to recognise that they are the subject of the discussion.

The execution

I locked myself up in the studio for a couple of weeks to make the 24 paintings. Minor setbacks included my framer stopping trading half way through and Damien Hirst buying the entire stock of primed, linen canvas from my supplier. I used a number of my usual painting techniques, including painting directly with my right hand and the extensive use of an ink dropper. However, the two largest canvases needed something else. I poured enamel from a large-necked bottle and then wrote through it with a very wide, edged-brush. The enamel was undiluted so spread very little when brushed, this lent an image of speed to the strokes which even slightly exceeded the actual speed of the brush. I'm starting to understand how the enamel dries over a few days. The pooling means that whatever marks I make will be enlarged or eradicated by the paint continuing to flow long after I have stopped painting. It's something to consider: paintings which continue after I have gone.

All the time I was thinking about the mural. It's of course the heart of the entire installation. It's always going to be a painting, a painting of writing. It's always going to play on that fact. It's never going to stop laughing at its own joke. But it has to take account of the viewer who a) won't get the joke and b) will soon be bored of trying to. Up a ladder for four days on four different walls, I've learned to pay attention to the minutest movements of the brush as it performs each of the strokes to make each of the letters. That's the thrill for me. That execution. So very deliberate, seemingly slow, so anti-painting and yet entirely painting. Hour after hour of repeated movements, ever closer to the end of the work. No time. Time dissolved in the action.