"So, in the case of the red painting Near Drinagh, (right) the whole of the shed was painted in Paynes grey … and then all I did was wipe it off the roof, wipe it off the wall and then leave it. See the hedge as well? It's covered in grey and then all wiped down. Same with the shadows."

He describes what he paints as "painting shadows". For him, one of the delights and insights into his paintings is that shadows have the same physicality, the same "reality" as the objects that cast them.

Looking at his painting The Blue High Street (left), he says: "Those little black marks, each and every one of them is a shadow or something that will cause or make a shadow fall. For instance, with the lamp posts in The Blue High Street, you follow the line down … instead of being a separate line, it's the same line in shadow".

Also in the ING exhibition were 2 small paintings based on a very different method, using white pastel - one of them, Green Bay (below). Graham referred to them as being in “shadow relief”.

With these particular paintings, the base is underpainted in white and left to dry for a month or two. No other colour is painted on, but, following an application of a painting medium, the images are created by using a tiny amount of oil paint put down in what is called impasto–pressed onto the surface hard so that an edge is forced. He describes this elaborate technique as being "the sort of equivalent of building lighthouses out of matchsticks. Slightly cuckoo! So obsessive, so repetitive that I did actually get RSI for two years doing it !"

 

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