I often like to plunge myself, immerse myself into a specific single colour, a totality of it. I think of it like the musical key of the painting - C or F sharp, etc... it's a starting point to work from. I think often of painters who worked in fields o f colour: Rothko, Matisse, Miró, where you are in the colour.

A room of close-patterned activity that seemed to exude noise. It came initially from nowhere without any reference, from the end of my brush, starting as I often do from a central point and radiating outwards, a sort of doodle. Blue on blue. I find blue the hardest colour to use.

At first it was a dentist's surgery, I was thinking about my troublesome teeth, then morphed into something more domestic and elaborate.

A sense of being hemmed in by pattern.

French Rococo/1970s carpets and wallpaper. No rest for the eye.

I was remembering Joseph as a baby and how he loved looking at pattern. We would put a particular bright blue patterned cushion in front of him and he would laugh hysterically. It was a whole entertainment in itself for him.

Often, we are drawn to something and later find some reason or connection to the attraction.

It happens a lot. Synchronicity - meaningful coincidence? Not sure, but we are pattern seeking animals. I kept going back to some photographs of the Rolling Stones and their extended entourage at Keith Richard's French mansion where they wrote and rehearsed their album Exile on Main St around 1970-72.

Keef appears in the mirror on the back wall, an echo of Las Meninas. Does that make the viewer Keef?

I am intrigued by his son Marlon Richards. A toddler amongst the chaos. I discover he was born at almost the same time as myself. I am three weeks older. At the time my life was quiet order and routine in a council house in Rochdale. No drugs.

Different lives lived in parallel with no connection.