MATERIA

Materia is the quietest corner of the collection: two square paintings about the colour itself, and nothing else. There is nothing to picture here – only pigment, and what it does when you let it move.

Prima Materia came first – the first painting I ever gave real, sustained time to. ‘First matter’ is the alchemists’ name for the substance everything is made from, and that is what this turned out to be: the matter all my other work grew from. It is built one dot at a time – a bead of water, pigment let to bleed into it, some drawn back with the corner of a tissue, gold where it wants gold, thousands of times by hand. I control the edges. What happens inside, I can't, and that is the whole point.

I never finished with it, either – somewhere in the studio there is always a new one going, in different colours. You can feel the time in a painting like this: the concentration that went into it passes straight to whoever stands in front of it, with nothing to explain. It is a reminder of what it means to slow down and give something your whole attention. It is the flow itself.

Flow is its twin, and its opposite. Where Prima Materia asks for your focus, Flow asks nothing at all – my whole palette let loose and falling together, with no puzzle in it and no answer wanted. Nothing and everything: the one painting here made purely to sit quietly in front of.

Between them, these two are the practice at its poles – the focus everything grew from, and the calm to set beside it. The dot born in Prima Materia still surfaces all through the other paintings. Both are available as fine art prints.