Normally when I start a painting I have to do some drawings to sort out the composition; something here, something over there, large, small, dark and light but how was I going to make a painting of 20 different fish, all different sizes, colours, textures? Do I put one here, a different one there…? Hmmm. I can’t go and buy 20 fish, plonk them on a table and just start moving them about so they look interesting because by the time I’ve decided what goes where the fish could have been sitting in the sun for a few hours, so I had to do this painting totally different to every other I’ve done: I went to a fish shop and took photos of all the different fish, they were all in polystyrene crates all nice a neat and ordered. I bought two fish, one to paint in the morning and the other in the afternoon, they were Scorfano Rossi because I had never seen them before. Back in the studio I flipped through the photos and noted the differences in scale and made some scribbles on a piece of paper; big one here, small one there, this one at an angle, this one bent and so I had a vague picture of how they could all fit together. I had a piece of hardboard already covered in canvas 90 x 140 cm but since I didn’t have any idea of the composition I had left it rectangular. When I had an idea of where to place the fish I started painting the fish on the canvas, just roughly indicating where each would go . In the evenings I cooked the fish. I repeated this until I had completed the composition and then shaped the painting and painted all the details.

oil on canvas on hardboard, 140 x 90 cm.