Painting the hour
before the light goes

I paint interiors, mostly my own and mostly at the end of the afternoon. The subject is not really the room — it is the particular quality of light that arrives just before it becomes necessary to switch something on, when colour drains out of everything unevenly and the corners go first.

A room is at its most honest in the twenty minutes before someone turns a lamp on.

Everything is worked from observation over a long period, which means the paintings record several afternoons rather than one. A chair moves between sittings. The light changes and I keep the earlier version. I have stopped regarding this as a problem to solve and started treating it as the actual subject.

The Refshaleøen series came out of walking to the studio along the water in winter. Industrial structures at that hour behave like furniture — they stop being cranes and start being shapes that interrupt a grey field. The two series are more closely related than they look.

I work in oil on linen almost exclusively, occasionally on board for studies. Slowly, in thin layers, with a great deal of scraping back. A large painting takes between four and nine months and I usually have three going at once because waiting for a layer to dry is unbearable otherwise.