I have painted predominantly in black and white for more than twenty years, mixing my own medium by combining graphite powders, resins and oil. The mixture is usually poured onto a resistant ground, worked with both traditional and unconventional implements, and removed to create the whites. The monochrome method facilitates improvisation and successive revision during the making, and yields a surface that retains immediacy. ‘Decorum and Despair’ relates to bereavement. Mutability vies with the stillness of grief in the transition conceit of moored boat and the linear time of tree trunk. Painting is in continuous dialogue with its many histories, and in this image the flatness of river derives in part from Japanese printmaking, while the birds-eye spatial construct owes something to Persian miniatures. This interplay of flatness and illusion finds its visual signifier in the folded modesty-screen for the one who has been left behind.