I say I’d love to see his studio, and he takes me down there. It’s near the Pells pond. It’s an amazing, large space, with a broken table in the middle. It looks as if a couple of artists have had a fight there using idiosyncratic materials as weapons, and then the dust has settled for a day or two. There are half-finished paintings all around the space; some lie flat, others are upright against the walls. “I work on a number of pieces at the same time,” he explains, “and I keep going back to them. The whole process might take two months. Every painting is a chance event. In a way none of them have anything to do with me. That’s where the mystery lies.” AL

The other artists in the Christmas exhibition are Erin Burns, Yoke Matze, Kaori Tatebayashi, Timea Sido, Mihuzo Koizumi, Kaya Hoang, Marlene McKibbin, Lesley Strickland and Michelle Holden. We particularly like the work of Burns, who layers various mediums on top of photographs of nature, to create a beautiful, delicate and strangely melancholic collage.