'Untitled (Room with Old TV, Lamps, Wildwood, New Jersey)', 2002.

Over the last couple of months I have had moments when the colour of things seemed accidental, as though reality comes in shades of grey and colour is a separate, less real addition. Idealist philosophy finds colour the easiest property to reduce to something that exists only in the mind. What is the 'real' colour of an object that looks white by day, orange under a street light and pink through rose-tinted spectacles? However, the source of my own moments of disassociation is not, I think, epistemological but a by-product of time spent painting watercolours from life, an activity that has brought with it the habit of judging light and dark while ignoring red and green.

LRB 25 February 2010 | PDF Download