Rainstone Fall

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What we called a studio at Mill House was really a leaky old barn at the top of the meadow, with the rattly windows I’d botched into one side creating on all but the brightest days the kind of medieval gloom Caravaggio would have killed for. It was a stormy afternoon in October and I’d lit the pot-bellied stove for the first time that autumn. Despite rainwater dripping into old pots and buckets here and there it was quite cosy. My world smelled of freshly brewed coffee, of logs and wood smoke and Venice turpentine, and I should have known it was too good to last. The stove was temperamental at the best of times but in this kind of weather it tended to puff smoke at you like a startled dragon. There’d only be a few hours of thin light left today and I was impatient to get on with some work. Simon Paris Fine Art had offered me a show in February. It was the graveyard shift, of course, but since I had missed my usual autumn slot through a complete lack of new paintings I couldn’t really be choosy.

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