Perspective in painting can be such a bore. Not much fun. The child's habit in ad rawing to put above what is actually spatially behind is often much more interesting. It's an instinct that dies hard and every painter has a medievalist inside them, to want to show space not as it looks but how it feels. Lay it out more like a map.

I like the surface of the book. I want to keep that.

One of the questions I get asked the most is whether the book I am painting on
is important to the image. Usually not. I choose them for their colour, surface, shape and occasionally their title and content. Many painters have used books as a support now and in the past. Paul Housley was the first painter I saw working on top of book covers. It was a show he did in London in the mid 1990s, an exhibition in his garden of paintings made with enamel paint hung on a fence; it was about ten years after this I thought of doing it myself.

Things made from rock and bone:

Pigment - from rocks, dug up from the earth. The jars I have often give the source - Italy figures a lot: Sienna, Umbria, etc. but also from places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, Croatia and so on.

The glue from the skin and glutinous bone of animals, as I understand not rabbits but cows. It's all quite basic and ancient really.

Materials transformed. Alchemy, shit into gold (hopefully).

Rock and bone.