Window, Dartmouth Row, Blackheath 1956

John Bratby made this painting, "Window, Dartmouth Row, Blackheath" with what looks like oil on canvas, and boy, does it have that thick, impasto feel. The texture is really what grabs me here. You can almost feel the bristles of the brush as it loaded up with paint and then dragged across the canvas. Look at that cornflakes box. Those colors aren’t mixed so much as they're laid on top of each other, raw and direct. It’s like he’s saying, “Here’s the stuff, deal with it.” The window itself, with its layers of translucent washes, is scumbled to suggest both the light coming through it, and the build up of grime. I think of Leon Kossoff, and how they both use the physicality of paint to capture the everyday, turning the mundane into something monumental. Ultimately, it's the act of painting itself that becomes the subject, a testament to the never-ending conversation between artists across time.