I've been up to my ears in admin today, frustratingly close to the studio but tied to this wretched laptop. I've been writing about painting techniques and I got around to thinking about how they came about. Take my last article on Imprimaturas - coloured layers at the start of a painting - I can understand that, I can see how its logical to look at a sunset and think 'I might put some red down first as a background colour', from that simple observation the technique grows... But then you look at a Turner, or Rembrandt's Jewish Bride, or Da Vinci, or Van Gogh and think how on earth did they make those leaps? The Jewish bride for example - we know Rembrandt was a very gifted illustrative painter ( a 'fine painter' in the parlance of the time) and that later in life he became somewhat looser in his application (a 'rough painter'), but then he throws together (and I choose my verb carefully) the Jewish Bride. The paint isn't so much applied as dashed, spattered, scored and thrown onto the canvas before being buried in a glaze here, knocked back by scraping there or highlighted with a stiff impasto in precise confident marks; one gets the sense of Rembrandt not working so much out of habit but driven by something else - intuition, inspiration, a moment of genius if you will. It's painting of the highest kind, but its not by the numbers; and I'm beginning to wonder how it comes about. You can see the same inexplicable 'rightness' in Monet, in Turner, in Titian, in Goya and certaibly Velasquez , but never in the work of more measured painters such as Wright of Derby, De Loutherburg or Stubbs. So tomorrow I'm going to knock the measured careful stuff on the head and put my paperwork aside and just play with paint; I don't think I'll ever amount to much, but I know from looking at people who did that it can't just come from being careful.