My father wrote a lot of letters to politicians and to the press.

In these letters he would rant about a number of diverse issues, so his letters were not always succinct.

I think that he wrote so many letters about the many subjects that exercised him that he may have relied upon the text of an occasional reply to remind him of the subject of his original letter.

Winston Churchill did reply but my father could never remember what his original letter had been about.

It must have been a rambling letter because Churchill’s reply was succinct:

“Dear Mr Dorey, I could not have failed to have disagreed with you less”

I’m working on a half a dozen paintings and my friend Peter recently asked why I’m having trouble finishing anything.

It isn’t, as he supposed, that I don’t know when a painting is finished. I’m reminded of my father’s letter writing in that there is there is a similar lack of focus so the work is confused and I’m a dog chasing his own tail.

Painting is not mindless copying; colours change throughout the day as the light alters so a painting is a synthesis and a contrivance. I have to decide what I want to say or to build and then to organize everything I put on the canvas to support that.

Colours and tone and line are like the words and grammar in a poem that should rhyme or clash and flow or jar.

One has to establish contrasts of light and dark and warm and cool and to place colours so that they reinforce each other. This is an early stage of one of the paintings I have been working on. I’ve decided that the light from the left is cool and so the wall on the right is warmer. The darker ‘greys’ of the photograph have violet in them whilst the back of the box has a bit of yellow in it but sometimes I look too hard, I find to much nuance in colour and tone and I alter colours pursuing the light as it changes … like a dog chasing his tail.

The photograph that I used in this still life and to which the painting owes so much is by Eric Kellerman, an English photographer who has lived for decades in Holland.