Between the Question and the Answer

I'm not a painter, but I do like to look at painting. I like to look at it, learn about it and try to understand it. So, that was the approach I took when I was on the panel for the Freelands Painting Prize 2026 alongside the painter Christina Kimeze and Eliza Gluckman, Director of the Government Art Collection. That is also what I'm going to do in this essay: look at the paintings we selected, learn from them and try to think about what they tell us about the current landscape of painting in UK art schools.

I've recently come to appreciate a few fundamental rules about looking at painting through making a podcast, Ten Texts on Painting, with artist, teaching colleague and fellow non-painter Andrea Francke.¹

Rule 1: Painting is a part of contemporary art, but it is also its own subject with its own distinctive concerns. To understand a painting you have to look at it as a painting, not just as an artwork.

Rule 2: Painting can do a lot of different things. Just when you think you've pinned down what a painting is doing, it does something else.

I had thought that I could put the works selected for the prize into categories and then write about them in groups. Upon first inspection, some seemed concerned with the materiality of paint, others with photography and screen images, autobiography and invented worlds.

But when I looked more closely at the paintings, they kept swapping categories or blurring the boundaries between them. This wasn't because the categories were wrong, it was because the paintings were doing several things at once (see rule 2).

The painter Amy Sillman writes that, 'in artmaking, things don't necessarily happen in order. They happen simultaneously, or they circle around and repeat, or they are incomplete … '.¹ 

The same might be said of looking at paintings. Materiality, subject matter, image, process, memory, identity and narrative do not appear one by one. They co-exist on the same painted surface.

In this text I'll write about the selected works in order to think through their material qualities, the role of making, the place of these works in the context of painting in the art school and finally how my own position as an art school teacher shapes my response to them. I'll do this in a way that mirrors how Andrea and I make our podcast. I'll look closely at the paintings selected for the exhibition, and use writing by critics, art historians and artists to help me understand what I'm looking at.

One thing that struck me throughout the judging process was the extent to which painting appeared as a multifaceted way of finding things out. As painters and researchers Alejandro Luna and John Walter put it, 'painting operates as a mode of inquiry in its own right: knowledge is produced through the act of making'.² The paintings seemed less interested in illustrating ideas than in discovering them; they inhabit, as the painter Lubaina Himid puts it, 'The moment between the question and the answer'.³

I'll begin with a group of works in which the material qualities of the paintings are closely tied to what they depict.

Charli-Ann Padilla's Vanilla flavoured coke is an exercise in painting a feeling; an experience as much as an image. The form on the canvas could be the title cola's foam, but it could also be an iced cake, or whipped cream and cherries. It is exuberant and viscous: food, paint. But then the surface is cracked and dry like a desert floor or a parched tongue. The use of paint here is playful and conceptual, as well as tactile and material.

Sillman describes a 'phenomenology of making that emanates from shapes, stains, spills, and smudges.'⁴ Padilla's painting feels close to this. It is tender and sloppy and reminds us that paint is not simply a vehicle for representation, it is a material with its own behaviours and possibilities – and, as Sillman postulates, a way of touching the world in order to know it.

There is a similar attempt to touch the world going on in Richie Batchelor's Possible virilising effects, in which fragments and iterations of bodies multiply across connected canvases. Bodies here are possibilities and potentialities, rather than static entities.

The handling of the paint changes canvas to canvas: staining and scratching, gestural marks and drawn lines, silhouettes and shifting tonalities. The body is not presented, as the artist says, as a 'fixed image', but produced and redistributed through paint. Each surface becomes a different condition of an unstable figure, reconfigured through differing paint work.

Lucy Grant's Blue Velvet Three is a profusion of shapes, drips and stains across a hung velvet support. Painted and drawn marks on the surface suggest horizons, cracked earth or seams of rock. These stand out against the dark colour and texture of the velvet, which also implies a cavern or cave system. Grant's use of materials is exploratory and experimental. But its materiality is not separate from what it depicts; it is also a way of picturing the geology of subterranean landscapes through its objecthood as well as its painted marks.

The slippage between representation and material in all three of these works exemplifies the way these artists operate across and between different ways of thinking about painting.

Questions of image and materiality shift emphasis in the works by Dexter Landesman-Chung and Rajesh Bhovan.

The philosopher Peter Osborne notes that film and photography's challenge to painting as a medium of representation has persisted throughout Modernism and beyond.⁶

Dexter Landesman-Chung's answer to this involves creating paintings that inhabit the mood or atmosphere of their source material. Padfoot, welcome home is an image of an image: a painting of a film still or photograph. However, it is not an image of an action or notable event. It seems to capture an in-between moment, after a dog has jumped down from a sofa, knocking the cushion down with it, sniffing in a circle before it leaves the room.

In the work of painter Noah Davis, curator Helen Molesworth says there is often a 'tension between extreme flatness … and a kind of void or space of depth'.⁷

Something similar happens in Landesman-Chung's piece. There is a void in the background of the painting – an opening in the curtains behind the dog. It is the punctum of the image, drawing the eye and piercing the illusionary depth of space. It gestures towards the construction of the rest of the painting, with its black ground showing underneath brushstrokes of colour.

Rajesh Bhovan's Radhe is also an image taken from elsewhere, this time Jean Renoir's The River (1951), a film set in Kolkata during British colonial rule. The female figure wears a crown, but the way it is painted pushes it into the background. All the depth and focus concentrates on the figure's face, which lives and breathes and glistens with presence in the way only a film image can, only here through paint. She looks past the viewer/camera towards somebody else, capturing our gaze with her gaze elsewhere.

Religion and cinema swirl around in the paint, here, the status of both contributing to the power of the work. The title names the figure as Radhe (or Radha), the Hindu goddess and feminine counterpart of Krishna, who appears at one point in the film. Bhovan prompts us to think about the difference between a film image and a painted image; the different weights of light and paint, of gold and canvas, of the held gaze and the frozen frame.

While these works deal with the photographic or filmic image, they also 'remain, insistently, paintings … ', as Osborne says of artist Gerhard Richter's work.⁸ They are paintings after photography, but through the act of painting they become something more than a picture of a photographic image.

If the photographic image is destabilised by painting, what happens to images of the self? Questions of identity and lived experience emerge differently in the work of Molly Tomlinson, Naomi Ashall, Robert McLeod and Sandy Kiralawella.

Defining autoethnographic painting as,'work that integrates biography, social context and lived experience without illustrating them directly', Luna and Walter describe 'painting as a temporal record of identity in formation … ',⁹ where biography and material experimentation continually shape one another.

None of these paintings are portraits, in the sense of depicting a specific person. Rather we see parts of bodies, things that touch bodies and bodies touching.

In Molly Tomlinson's painting Postcoital Dysphoria, we see underwear – clothing that makes us think of private spaces, spaces of sex, intimacy to the body and the bodies of others. Tomlinson's focused and detailed depictions of lace bras relies on a sustained act of looking, which emerges as another kind of intimacy between the artist and the artwork.

We look, alongside Tomlinson, at the paint and what is painted, at the surface coverings and inner workings of other people: the self performed through what we wear. Clothes here are an index and a barrier, something that both reveals and hides the person wearing them.

In Naomi Ashall's Hurting, what is depicted is not the face but an attempt to cover the face, in pose and in paint. Unlike a portrait, we are not invited to gaze at the person in the picture: we watch them shield their face from our eyes. The face is no longer there but we're not looking at an empty space – it is erased with paint and we focus on it because of that erasure. We tend to the erased face with our eyes, just as it is caressed by the hands of the figure in the painting.

All of this is in gestural, dripping paint on canvas pinned directly to the wall. It is an open, unrestrained painting of intense discomfort. A painting of the scopophobic desire to hide from the gaze of others, rendered as an image that offers the viewer the scopophilic pleasure of looking.

Robert McLeod's Undressing depicts an unexpected locus of desire. We take the view of a lover or admirer who stares intently at the hands and back of the subject as he removes his shirt. Such events, the kind that make us fall in love or lust, become an image at the moment they are committed to memory, and what we see is the careful rendering of such an image.

Paint, here, is a way of fixing what has been noticed, but what the viewer notices are certain ways of painting: the bulky shadow of T-shirt folds, the clarity of brushwork on the hands that hold the centre of the image. The painting is tiny but powerful in its focus, replicating the surprisingly thick detail contained in certain memories.

Sandy Kiralawella's Sex in Solitude takes the form of an expanded painting, breaking the bounds of the support, coming off the wall through the use of sculptural as well as painterly techniques. The piece brings together private, public and political forms of desire in the way the painting works with found objects.

An image of a couple embracing spreads across the surface of a painted Mercedes-Benz bumper and brings the fetish objects of the fast car and flag into contact with bodily desire. Speed, force, nationalist fervour and domination are held up against sex and intimacy. Behind the bumper, a more ambiguous image of one military figure touching the body of another complicates any easy distinction between bodily urges and performances of power and status.

Lubaina Himid has said, 'I am all the people in the paintings; all the women and all the men'.¹⁰

That observation feels useful here. These works are not straightforward portraits or self-portraits, yet the figures depicted are entangled with the self of the painter. Identity appears not as a fixed thing but as something made, inhabited, performed, remembered and worked through in painting.

The final group of works seem concerned with invented worlds, implied narrative and imagined spaces. Yet, they too resist neat categorisation.

The painter Philip Guston's claim, 'I paint what I want to see,'¹¹ is often repeated, but the full quote is: 

'If I speak of having a subject to paint, I mean there is a forgotten place of beings and things, which I need to remember. I want to see this place. 
I paint what I want to see.'

This and other comments made throughout his career suggest that, rather than simply producing an intended image, Guston was often following the painting as though it had its own intentions or internal reality – trying to get to it, to understand and see something that can only exist in paint.

Guston's quote is a useful way to think about Topaz Joelle's smoking cats, a recurring motif in her work and an image I didn't realise I wanted (needed?) to see until I saw it. In Lucifer's Beginning, the fallen feline angel smokes their way across a landscape that dissolves into a shonky pointillist field of dots and dashes.

The title suggests hell but the work itself is full of pleasure and comic joy played out in paint.

Karlien De Mot's The sea inside could be a portrait, or an autoethnographic painting as discussed above, but the rabbit in the figure's arms, the foreshortening of the body and the ambiguity of the figure's clothing/colouring suggest something more dreamlike. The image feels like a fantasy, not in the everyday sense of wish fulfilment, but as a way of structuring and navigating desire.

We paint what we want to see, but what we see is not simply what we want.

Yuchen Zhan's Otherworld presents an ethereal landscape glowing from within. This is not a place we have seen before, or are meant to know. Its otherness is the point.

She rejects the Renaissance model of the canvas as a window onto a world that we are invited to step into. Instead, we peer in from outside and note how its impossibility is only possible through paint.

The red, oranges and yellows conjure an atmosphere of lights floating through the night sky, but abstracted motifs and a grid-like form hinted in the background puncture any illusionistic depth or sense of a landscape. It is as though we are encountering this world for the first time along with the artist as they paint it.

The panel chose these paintings through a screen. (I am writing this piece in the same way: switching between browser tabs and zooming in and out of jpegs.)

Part of the way we decided what to include was by thinking about which works produced a desire in us to see them in person. We wanted to encounter them through the embodied eye, rather than as a digital image.

That desire says something about the place of these works in the landscape of painting in British art schools. Again and again these works return us to questions of materiality, process and making. Even when they draw on autobiography, sculpture, cinema or fantasy, they remain paintings – records of encounters between artists and materials.

I tell my students (whether painters or not) to think about the questions they ask when they make art. If we only ask yes/no questions of art, we limit what we can learn through making and looking at it. But if we phrase our questions in the open form of, 'What happens when … ?'*, we ensure that we learn something, while remaining faithful to the specificity of our practices. 

All the selected artists ask these kinds of open questions and are committed to finding things out through painting.

*Thanks to artist Christian Newby for this questioning approach.

^{Header image: Charli-Ann Padilla, Vanilla flavoured coke, 2026 (detail).} 

1. Ten Texts on Painting podcast available at: https://linktr.ee/ten_texts.
2. Amy Sillman, ‘Ab-Ex and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism II’, Artforum, vol.49, no.10, June 2011, p.323.
3. Alejandro Luna and John Walter, Disruptive Painting, Bibliotheque McLean, 2026, p.3. 
4. Ibid.
5. Sillman, ‘Ab-Ex and Disco Balls’, p.322.
6. Ibid., 325.
7. Peter Osborne, ‘Painting Negation: Gerhard Richter’s Negatives’, October, no.62 (autumn 1992), pp.103–13.
8. Helen Molesworth, ‘Helen Molesworth Introduces Noah Davis’, David Zwirner
   website: https://www.davidzwirner.com/news/2020/helen-molesworth-noah-davis-walkthrough-video (accessed 14 April 2026).
9. Osborne, 'Painting Negation', p.107.
10. Luna and Walter, Disruptive Painting, p.6.
11. Lubaina Himid, ‘A Conversation + Keywords’, in Lisa Panting & Malin Ståhl (eds.),
    Lubaina Himid: Workshop Manual, Koenig Books and Modern Art Oxford, 2019, p.299.
12. Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See, Penguin Random House, 2022, p.182.

Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau is an artist working across moving image, drawing, performance and sculpture. He is Pathway Leader for MA Fine Art: Sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts.

He studied at Northumbria University, Open School East, and is completing a practice-based PhD in art and performance at Kingston School of Art.

He has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA PS1, Barbican, ICA London and Serpentine Galleries. Awards include support from Arts Council England, Jerwood Foundation, Modern Art Oxford and Open School East.

His writing has appeared in Performance Research, Corridor8 and Sluice Magazine, and his work has been featured in publications by Condé Nast and Chateau international.

The Freelands Painting Prize celebrates outstanding painting by final-year undergraduate artists attending art schools and universities across the UK. 

The winner is announced in autumn, at the opening of an exhibition of works by all of the shortlisted artists’ work at the Foundation’s home in London. They receive a prize from Freelands Painting Prize partners, Wallace Seymour, makers of high-quality painting and drawing materials, of a consultation and £1,000 worth of materials.