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You know, one thing about paintings is there's no set time to how long you look at them,
that you can... you bring the time to it yourself so, you know, you can literally see a room
at a glance, or you can spend your whole life looking at just one thing.
Obviously as a painter one hopes people will spend a lot of time looking at things, and
I think inevitably, you know, you get more out of something the longer you look at it.
In my own work I try and actually play on that.
That almost becomes part of the subject; that the more you look, the more you will get and
that it's... there's a slowness to it. This painting's perfect example of this for
me because I've been looking at it for over 20 years. One thing that fascinates me about
this painting is that Degas kept it all his life, and that it was in his studio and I
think he worked on it over many, many years. He had it around and perhaps reworked it a
couple of times, over decades, but it's a painting that I've always been drawn back
to, again and again and found... always find more. So I was really fascinated that he kept
it and almost as a leitmotif, I think. The composition is so extraordinary of, you
know, the girls on one side, the boys on the other. It's very mysterious, what exactly
they're doing. Okay, so it says they're sparring, but it
almost seems to be a coming-of-age painting. It's very much, you know, youths on the verge
of adulthood. I was struck by how timeless it was when I was even in the park last summer,
and I was thinking about this painting. I'd been looking at it in the... a reproduction
in the studio and I saw these bunch of teenagers mucking about and the girls
sort of going up and hitting the boys and running away and I thought, it's just the
Young Spartans, 21st Century. It is hard to explain a group of naked pre-teens in the
landscape. I mean, in a way, you feel like that's what the classical figures in the middle
are doing. They really put it at a polite distance, almost, by saying, this isn't now
and this happened a long time ago, therefore it's not risqué. But I also feel that there's
such a tension between the boys ad girls that you do feel it's the girls that make the boys
seem straight. The thrust of her pulling the action into
the centre of the painting and the boys, their faces, the range of expressions is extraordinary.
They've always reminded me of the angels in the Piero della Francesca Nativity; that sort
of slack jaw, open mouth, this almost *** expression on the second boy's face. But there's
almost this sort of faux arrogance. You feel that it really captures that, you know, boys
that... they're trying to be more confident than they really feel. You know, they're sort
of, they're mocking, but you feel that they're actually intimidated in that way that boys
are with girls around that age. There always seem to me to be too many legs
for the number of figures. You know, there are ghosts of legs, there are extra legs,
they're faded, they're drawn over each other; you know, the sense of this scuffle going
on. You know, there's a possible fifth figure in there. I just love this... the suggestiveness
of it and the way that... you know, this feeling of not quite knowing what you're looking at.
I still find it completely compelling and that, you know, you go away from something
and come back and with the passing of time, you know, I've changed but the painting also
seems to change.