Rosemary: a portrait that wouldn’t sit still

I’d set out to make a straightforward portrait of Rosemary. She’s normally the picture of composure, but on my easel she immediately started acting up. The initial female figure was there for all of ten minutes before she began wriggling and stretching into a mess of gestural lines and amorphous forms. I kept turning the piece as if I were looking for a bus that never comes – horizontal, vertical, upside down – and each rotation brought out a new conversation. Rosemary and I argued, laughed and eventually agreed that she needed to burst out of her figurative corset and become something more explosive.

The resulting composition is a riot of shapes and textures. Delicate graphite scribbles give way to bold, painterly gashes; a washed-out yellow peers through the pink like Croydon’s own sunrise over the flyover. There are hints of limbs and faces in the mess, but nothing is fixed – the figure dissolves into a chromatic field of colour and line. The piece sits somewhere between portrait and abstraction, between sarcasm and a serious exploration of form and colour.