As my residency progressed, I began to get more and more interested in drawing in ink. I haven’t used ink all that much in the past; in fact most of my work has always been about colour, so it was great to have a chance to really explore this medium. I liked the slightly nerve-wracking fact that it had to be right first time: unlike charcoal or pencil, you can’t correct ink. What worked best for me, was to draw the same figures over and over again, discarding the earlier attempts, until I reached a point where I felt it had come out right.  I have always really liked that feeling of just letting ideas flow out, uninterrupted, and then deciding and editing at a later stage.

By the time I was halfway through my residency at St George’s, I had done more than 150 of these studies, and I was beginning to get a bit fed up of doing such small drawings. I decided to try enlarging some of my favourite ones to life size. I found that if I used wallpaper lining paper, cut them out and stapled them to the gallery wall, they looked as if I had drawn them directly onto the wall.  Someone had left an enormous bottle of black ink from a previous workshop, so the combination of that, and not having to worry if it all went wrong, because it was only wallpaper, meant that I could really take risks.

It was rather tricky seeing what I was doing as I worked, because even if I drew them on the floor, they were always in perspective. However, I found that if I laid them out in the main bit of the church, and went upstairs to the balcony overlooking them, I could get a much better idea of how they were coming out. In fact, working in the church turned out to be ideal for this, as there was just so much space to lay all the wet ones out.

Towards the end, I set up tables so that I could draw on a large scale directly from the quartets.