UCAS, the universities clearing service, have a new corporate HQ in Cheltenham. I was commissioned to create an installation of thirteen paintings for the largest office space, called "Reasons to be here".

An hour long painting on the road.

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!'."

Who were your tutors? Who were your important artists/influences at that time?

I knew virtually nothing about art. I was influenced by Japanese and Chinese calligraphers and western type designers. All I could concentrate on was making perfect letters and thinking harder and harder about what space is. Eventually I came across the work of a Chicago signwriter, Edward Catich, who made an amazing discovery about the origins of our Roman letterforms which he wrote up in a book calledThe Origin of the Serif.

If you like to know how things are made

The mural in the first room is painted directly on the gallery walls. I've used a technique invented by the Romans. For many of their best inscriptions, a scribe would write directly on the marble with a chisel-edged brush with a red pigment called minium. This writing was carved out with a chisel to preserve it then the carved letters were repainted in red to make them stand out from the white stone. Most modern typefaces have unknowingly copied the forms naturally created by the swiftly moving brush.

The only framed piece in Tom Kemp’s latest one-man show at the recently refurbished OVADA Gallery in Oxford contains an extended meditation on the subject that continues to intrigue and trouble him. Written out in pencil in three dense columns during a single eight-hour session it is entitled Drawing Itself: ‘Its premise is that drawing is always of something and never just drawing. It asks if it is possible to have simply drawing itself.’ By using his left hand, Tom dissociates himself from the formal constraints of disciplined letterform, so that the medium itself serves to question our preconceptions further.