Copper, July 2004, 40" x 32"

This is the painting that, more than any other, I felt marked the point where I became 'an artist'.

I had for some time been trying to discover why Renaissance painters could achieve such luminosity in their paintings when even their modern imitators could not. Imagine that you have to grind up all your pigments yourself and then blend these with controlled amounts of oil. All organic materials vary in the qualities they posess. Think of when you last bought oil from the supermarket: was it cloudy from cold? Thin and sloshy compared to when you bought the 'same' product before? Now try and imagine an artist having to cope with the variance in the raw tools of his trade.

It seemed to me that the reason artists used so many inorganic materials was simply to gain some sort of order and consistency in their work. Some of these pigments were mineral salts, that is, a metal and a halide (like sodium chloride), so why not just use the metals? Mix the metals with mineral based pigments... use an organic material to create variety and shade. It was my Eureka moment.

I have always used acrylics to paint with despite the opinion of certain writers I have read in various 'how to' manuals that the medium simply cannot achieve the same results as oil. True: if you don't know how to use acrylic paint.

Acrylic paint is a truly dynamic medium. It imposes dynamic energy on paintings and there is one very simple reason: it dries fast. On making an error of judgement, the painter will find that acrylic cannot be wiped off a canvas as you can when painting with oil. I never use retarding material to slow the rate of drying. It diminishes the vibrancy of the colour. Another criticism of acrylic is that it behaves like an amateur's painting medium inasmuch as you can always paint over your mistakes. Well, no, you can't because even the thinnest application of acrylic obscures the grain of the canvas making an error-corrected area stand out. This is much like a rock climber using plaster-and-trowel to smooth over the parts of the mountain he finds are beyond his abilities. It's wrong and doesn't make sense. As anyone who has ever attempted to paint in the chiaroscuro method will be aware: what lies beneath the paint will show through to the surface. Don't think so? Then compare the power of light and contrast in Copper to the painting of the beach scene above. Copper was painted on a black canvas, slowing working up from darker shades to white. The landscape scene above was painted on the more usual white-primed canvas.