And I encouraged Eric with his work, I felt protective of him. I was just a bit older than him. He talked about his struggles, how art school had been an inspiration for him. I’d not gone to art school, I’d studied history of art at university, I think you know that.

At university I spent hours in the library looking at images of paintings — pale imitations — in books. Hours and hours poring over those images, and later I bought my own books with colour plates. I kept them in my studio, piled haphazardly on a small table near the window. Velázquez: Las Meninas. The self-portraits of Rembrandt. Manet’s Black.

It seemed to me that Las Meninas contained all the light, but especially, the darkness — that darkness he achieved with black, shades of black. The layers and depth on the canvas, in the canvas. The room portrayed in that painting; its mirror. There was the girl in a white dress. Perhaps I was the girl in a white dress.

Velázquez knew everything.

AFTER UNIVERSITY I found Jocelyn. Jocelyn Turner, the art teacher who became my mentor. Without her — without Jocelyn — I would be nothing. I think so. She guided me, as I worked towards my own . . . language, my own painting language. I’d sit in her workroom, it was a room flooded with white light, its high windows, we could see the tall trees of her garden, moving, leaves touched by the slight breeze. Long afternoons spent at the wooden table, that long worktable. And Jocelyn’s voice, she had a soft voice.

At Jocelyn’s worktable I learned the feel of paper, different kinds of paper. Rougher paper, or finer, or heavier and thicker paper. More textured.

I learned the exactness of a pigment: cadmium yellow. Ivory black, and carbon black. The whites: titanium, zinc, and the best one, lead. Lead white, or flake white. The colour most often on my palette, later.

In my memories Jocelyn’s room is a soundscape, the sound, that rustling sound of paper, or of graphite — pencil — moving on paper. The small sound of a jar of turpentine set down on the wooden table, a faint setting down. And the brushstrokes on canvas, such a soft sound, if you used a large, flat brush. Or perhaps I just imagine I heard that, because mostly you don’t hear brushstrokes.

You don’t hear paint. Or perhaps you do.

I learned the techniques of oil, the layering. I learned about underpainting, that first, original layer. The one on which the whole work, all the next layers, are built.

I learned how long it takes for oil paint to dry, for the layers, for each layer, to dry. It takes a long time.

WITH JOCELYN, under Jocelyn’s guidance, I moved from figurative work towards abstraction. Over time, it no longer interested me to represent things. I became more interested in textures, in pure colours, in the rhythm underlying the canvas, or the rhythm and tone underlying things, something like that.