3. The look of his studio is like any other, pretty chaotic. Paintings are half finished or finished. Pots are on the floor. Brushes, papers, a telephone, nothing all that interesting -- the paintings look very straightforward, they don't show any existential agonising, they seem like jobs of work, but arbitrary at the same time -- the arbitrariness is to do with his own feel for relationships: what set of proportions is right, when does an object start to feel like an abstract proposal, something meaningful and thoughtful, offering delight like any carefully proportioned sculpture from thousands of years ago? Who's that on the telephone? I think I'll make some coffee.

4. He sees something and likes it, sees a colour on the way to the studio, for example. Light, textures, surfaces, there are new experiences all the time, and he tries to build them in.

The paintings answer to his daily awareness of ordinary colour, they're not colour-charts or scientific demonstrations or exercises, they have an ordinary innocent life of their own, like the sympathetic wonky feel of the studios he's working in, the walk in the door every day, the sight of the tables, pots and brushes in the room.

The paintings are more compressed and more honed and crisply detailed than these impressions. And unlike them their look never changes.

They are monumental not fleeting. But it's the ordinary human world of constant change, of constant finding and losing, that they commemorat

© Matthew Collings 2008

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