I would never have come up with this piece if I’d set out to do it

Abstract, household paint and acrylic with cement on plywood

I was trying too hard and getting very frustrated. The painting was horrible, contrived and uninteresting. It had what seemed to be an emerging collection of apples.

I blocked out the surroundings with cement-stiffened paint to see if I could make it come together but it didn’t. I got fed up with it and smeared the paint into big murky swishes. I thought it looked like whirling dancers with long wide skirts, seen from above.

But I still didn’t like it. I painted some black lines with a wide brush to make a loose bowl shape for the apples. By now the whole thing was very dark and grim.

I mixed some slightly yellowed white household paint and used a big brush to paint rectangle shapes on top of the whole thing. Then some slightly reddened black to follow some of the swirls. It got worse and worse, with horrible orangey bits coming through.

In despair I started to block in the black bits, all with a big brush. The paint dragged on the cement. Only once the last bit was filled in did an entirely new picture emerge. I liked it.

I think it worked because everything that had been on it was painted over, but some of the original shapes and energy had been translated into the new broad strokes. The textures limited what the strokes could do too, giving them an awkwardness I liked.

I thought, well, the layers have been all but covered over, but they’ve shaped the final work. Or rather, I’ve shaped the final work in response to them. It was my first experience of feeling that the work came from a genuine correspondence between me and the painting.