​In the beginning there was turpentine. And there were brushes. There were rags and jam jars, and murky, paint-dried palettes. There was Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Alizarin Crimson, and Titanium White. The sticky-sweet viscosity of linseed oil, the spirit-thin transparency of meths, oil and pigment bleeding from twisted tubes onto half a dozen Georgian mantelpieces ... The fraying balls of cotton wool we found dotted around the house were each pungent with solvent and marked with a different code, a different colour, the imprint of my father’s work, the painting which was his life-blood. His art was a form of natural selection. We, his biological children, shared our nurturing with Still Lifes, Nudes, and formal Portraits, inhabited a London landscape that was all the greyer for being observed (with all the tools of an obsessive painter’s unflinching rigour) through tortoiseshell spectacles, or from the dusty windows of terraced houses. Camden, Islington, and Hampstead, or, in his earlier days ...