My starting point was a remembered article on Alan Davie in Homes and Gardens magazine. It was an old 1950s issue that belonged to art critic Cordelia Oliver. I bought it from a house clearing after she died. Later an unsent letter fell out the magazine. It began “Dear Joan”. Presumably it was meant for her friend Joan Eardley.

I seem to be working my way round Liza’s flat. Here is her Afghan war rug, and her bookshelves, an ongoing battle between unruliness and order. The shelves worried me a lot. They were made by a mutual friend of ours who rigorously applies his spirit level, but I don’t like things to get too straight, especially in paintings. I find when I make straight lines with a straight edge I make them deliberately slightly squint ( slightly mind). Mondrian gone wrong. The hope is that the accumulative, almost subliminal, effect is a slight jarring, an awkwardness, a sense of subsidence, but barely perceptible. That is it looks right but you know it to be wrong, like when a moon is not quite full, not quite.

The figure on the right could be Alan Davie. His pose was suggested by a photograph of a young Piet Mondrian, in his theosophy days, practising yoga. On the other side another figure. His wife perhaps. A couple. I was thinking of Hockney’s painting of Ossie and Celia with Percy the cat, thought his is definitely a happier relationship than that.