Materials: About a metre square Arches paper, compressed charcoal, spray fix, black oil paint

Equipment: Masking tape, coarse sandpaper, garden broom, small pointing trowel

Made the frame the usual way. Tending toward a thinner frame, resembling, it seems to me, a hand printed black and white photo frame. I worked in a darkroom for a while and remember the thrill of the alchemical processes, the risk of pushing things too far, knowing when to stop. I like the excitement and fear when confronted with the delimited area.

Once the frame is made what happens next is unplanned. I’m coarsely grating compressed charcoal over the paper mixed with the sweepings from the previous work. I look around the studio. There’s a broom here, part plastic part wire bristle, from the garden. I’m brushing the width of the head across the paper. It’s making beautiful lines, picking out shapes from the cardboard beneath. Shadows. It’s difficult not to think strata, radar, horizon, sky, cloud. I’m mark making, interacting with material. I’m not trying to represent landscape. But the human mind, in league with senses, does what it does and once done its hard to undo, though its fun to try. Without language everything would be two dimensional. With language even two dimensions become three. It’s fun to remind oneself, force oneself, to go back from three to two.

Now I’m confronted with this moody flat landscape and I want to place some oily sculpture into it.

I poke the thin trowel into the tube of paint as far as it will go and pull out a sort of wedge of oil paint. A shining black sliver of potential.

I place the point on the brushed pencil lines where they meet the dust and push the flat of the blade onto the paper slightly drawing it upward. Paint squelches out the sides and blurs at the top. I repeat, trying to divide up the paper equally.

At this point I might apply my tracing paper technique with the Stanley knife blade and see what happens. But I like these strange little monoliths all in a line. Pilgrims? Refugees? Soldiers?

None of the above.

Smears of paint and manipulated carbon on paper.