Why I paint small

A bread roll at eighteen by twenty-four centimetres. People sometimes ask why I don't paint bigger — surely a larger canvas is more impressive, more valuable, more serious?

The honest answer is that small is harder. On a small panel every brushstroke counts double; there is nowhere to hide a lazy passage. The light on a crust of bread has to be right in three strokes, not thirty.

Small paintings are also intimate in a way large ones cannot be. They ask to be hung where you actually live — beside the kitchen door, above a desk — and looked at from arm's length, daily, rather than admired once from across a room.

So I keep painting small. The subjects are small too: a robin, a bun, a handful of tangerines. Moments and details that might otherwise easily pass by — which is, after all, the whole point.