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When I'm painting I work on about a dozen to sixteen paintings over a year and I do
a little bit of each, each day and turn them away. And over twelve months or a year or
sixteen months they slowly accumulate and help each other to finish. I thought I couldn't
really work on the drawings like this; they had to be done much more systematically. So
I decided - this was in September 2011 - to start, every Monday, two drawings and work
until the end of the week. And there would be two days of teaching in between that as
well. Just to let the unconscious, in a way, guide me and see what happens. It was just
a sort of voyage in the unknown, to plunge into it and it's remarkable how the unconscious
has, in a sense, formulated a sequence and gone into areas which I just never envisaged.
This was without looking each week; I'd just finish them and put them away. Obviously they
would be there somewhere in the back of my mind. Initially they started off with familiar
images in the sense of things I'd done in previous paintings but gradually new areas
opened up. New objects, props arrived in this space. The main thing was to have a space
which was coherent throughout the series and then to, within the space, let things evolve
and let the props be the actors and see where they went. All sorts of things came, which
was a complete surprise.