 It's a pleasure to welcome so many of you tonight. This evening, we are particularly honoured to count among us the artist, Lynette Yadon-Boachy, Ted Brittain's director of exhibition and display, Andrea Schlecker, and Isabella Madman, Ted Brittain's curator of British contemporary art. For a conversation that will take you us through the work of Lynette Yadon-Boachy. So thank you very much, all of you, free to be with us tonight. Thank you. So before passing the floor to Lynette, Andrea, and Isabella, whom we'll enlighten us on the works and the exhibition, I would like to briefly introduce the artist and the exhibition. So, Madame is proud to host the exhibition, Flying League with the Night, as it's the most extensive survey of the British artist, Lynette Yadon-Boachy, to that date. Flying League with the Night is a touring exhibition organised by Tate, developed in collaboration with the Moderna Museum of Stockholm, the Kunstfarmlung Nordrhein-Westfalen-Dusseldorf, and Madame Luxembourg. It has been first presented at Ted Brittain in November 2020, then to Moderna Museum Stockholm from July to September 2021, and then at Kunstfarmlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf from October 2021 to February 2022 before being presented here in Madame. And after Madame's presentation, this exhibition will be restaged at Tate Brittain for a full three months round, as it was closed almost right after the opening in November 2020 because of the pandemic. So few works about the artist. So born in London in 1977, Lynette Yadon-Boachy has become over the course of that last decade one of the most internationally acclaimed artists. She has previously held solo exhibitions at the New Museum of New York in 2017, at the Kunstal Bisselle in 2016, Serpentine Gallery in London in 2015, and more recently she participated in the Gannon Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Lynette was also awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 2018 and was the 2012 recipient of the Pinschuk Foundation Future Generousing Prize. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013. So Lynette Yadon-Boachy is celebrated for her enigmatic old painting of fictitious black subjects, but beside being an important painter, she is also a writer of pros and poetry. And as you will notice, the subtle encounter of writing with painting is sensitive through the evocative titles of the works. At MEDAM, the exhibition is presented in the two ground floor galleries. It brings together 67 works and span two decades of the artist's production. The artist has conceived the layout of the exhibition and the space has been divided in eight rooms without a strict chronology or thematic, but according to the dynamics and conversations between paintings, as you will see in this playfully choreographed exhibition, the painting figures appear to be looking at each other or looking away or looking at us, and they engage doing so a dialogue with us while at the same time they inhabit their own world and stay at further distance. It's a constant pack-and-forth relation with the visitor. At first glance, the painting of Lynette Yadon-Boachy does equal of the painted portrait to the genre, but the depicting people are fictitious. They are born from the imagination, the story of the artist, and these fictitious figures seem to exist outside of the specific time and place. Even if they belong through their style to our age, you can hardly find any clues that gives an indication about the context. The backgrounds of the scenes are mostly natural. Doing so and avoiding a detailed mise-en-scene, the painting is spontaneous and the brush strokes are vibrant, but the mood of each painting is crowd through careful intention to facial expressions, gestures, and color. One will also notice how distant and elusive are the titles from the depicted scenes. The version is no evidence. The gap between both opens a space for a free interpretation of what is seen. For all these reasons, if Lynette Yadon-Boachy, sorry, figurative art relates to the story of painting, it is nevertheless an unconventional painting in regard of the portraiture genre tradition. And I will now pass the floor to our guest and let them start the conversation. Thank you again. Thank you. In 1977, grew up in London. You did foundation at first in London, but then you went to Falmers, which is in Cornwall in the far west of England, and you studied at the Falmers School of Art. And I just wondered, I know this was a really important period for you. Could you tell us a little bit about your experience? Okay, like I said, this is working. Okay, oh, God, I sound so hollow. I can't. I'm gonna struggle to concentrate, but hello, everyone, and thank you. Thank you for coming. Yeah, so the beginning. So when I finished the foundation course, which was a course we do in, I don't know how familiar you are with the education system for art in the UK, but the foundation course is a very general course where you try a bit of everything and you specialize at some point. So there was a point where I decided I wanted to specialize in fine art as opposed to car design or fashion or any of the other things. And when it came time to apply to do a degree, for me, the choice was always gonna be London, another major city that's like London, or somewhere completely different. And really, there was no other major city in the UK I wanted to be in than London. So I went for the other extreme, which was Falmouth, which is, I don't know if anyone here is familiar with the Southwest of England, but it's very, very different to London, suffice it to say. It's by the sea, it's a very, what's the word? It's a tight community, it's smaller, and the landscape and the scenery is extraordinary. And looking around this room actually is kind of making me think of how being there influenced me kind of subliminally. I wasn't really, I didn't paint landscape while I was there, but I did become very much more sensitive to light and color and surroundings. And I think even more importantly, because when I arrived I really didn't know what to do with myself, that a process of collecting things, of synthesizing, of thinking intuitively, but also I don't really know how to describe this, allowing your mind to go a little bit. I'd always thought art was quite, was involved a lot of logic, which it does, and obviously skill and training, but there was something else that I think I needed to be away from my surroundings where I'd grown up, London, which is very particular, and be somewhere else where I could let my mind go. So I think maybe that's a good place to start, letting the mind go. It's an excellent place to start. It's thank you everyone for being here this evening, and thank you Lynette for sharing your time with us. It's really brilliant, I think, to start with Falmouth of all the places in all the world, because it was there, I think, that you really made that pragmatic decision, that choice to move away from portraiture per se. You trained, of course, working from life, and we might instinctively think of your work. Of course, it's figurative, it's absolutely figurative, but these are not portraits per se very far from it. I wondered if you might talk to us a little bit about that choice, that decision to take a step away from reality, in a sense. Well, also very much committing to a figurative project that's utterly anchored in truth, I feel. Be great to hear you speak a little bit about that. Yeah, so I think I made the realization very early on, as much as I was fascinated by people, and I like a lot of people. I wasn't really thinking in terms of painting people I knew, or trying to capture the essence of anyone who was already around me or in my life, or anyone who came knocking. It was very, there was a bit of a separation for me. I became less interested in that than allowing a certain freedom to let it be anything. And that was much more obvious earlier on. I didn't really know how to paint. I mean, I still think I don't know how to paint, because I don't think you ever, you never actually, I never actually learned. I never, we didn't really train. By the time I went to art school, it was very out of fashion to teach anyone anything, especially in London in the 90s, late 90s to early 2000s. We would spend a lot of time talking about what we weren't doing and why we weren't doing it, and how to stop doing it ever again. And for me, that was extremely confusing. It was one of the reasons why I didn't wanna, I didn't really wanna stay in London to do my degree, because it was that conversation very much around not painting was a bit of a distraction when you're trying to paint or think about it. And so, for me, it was moving as far away from that as possible in a way. So, having that time, like a full three years, to move from the training of how to render something, and that wasn't just figures, that was objects, places, nature, to keep that and yet not be, and yet to mix it up, to make things composite, to draw on various different sources, and think more like a poet. I mean, I didn't think about it at the time, because I really didn't know what I was doing, but as time went on, the more I was writing, painting, drawing, taking photos, doing other things, all of the different components, I started to think about how these things linked, and what the link might be, which I felt was more important than anything I was doing, all of which was bad, like really, really rubbish. I haven't, I don't think I've kept any of it. My mom might have some in the shed, actually, but apart from that, I mean, there isn't much that exists from that time, but I have memory of it, and it was very confused, but also, it's funny looking back on it now, and seeing all the components, it was starting to make a kind of sense. I just didn't, it took another 10 or 15 years to work out what that was. The 10 and 15 years gap is a very interesting thing, isn't it, because this exhibition spans 20 years, essentially, and of course the past three years in which we've been making it together feel like another few decades in their own right, but I wondered if you could say a little bit about what it feels like to survey your career in this particular moment. I think we're in a period where we're all very much looking back in order to move forward or find ways to move forward in this very strange period in time, and it's been really fantastic to have the opportunity, for us, to be together, to see these works again and to share this space together, but I wondered what it feels like for you to even grapple with making a survey of your career. From, of course, we do actually have work from 2003, brilliantly titled first in this exhibition, which was in your degree show at the RA School, so it must feel quite extraordinary to bring all these works together for the first time. Yeah, I mean, when we first started to select the work for the Tate, the first iteration of the show, I, going back, because you always think of yourself as quite young and sprightly and it seems like yesterday, all of these things seem like yesterday and then realizing that the first work we selected was about 20 years ago, I realized I wasn't so young anymore, first of all, but also to see the work in the flesh again, I was a bit worried actually when all the work, when we selected the work and I knew it was coming back, I didn't think I would like a lot of it. I thought I'd be quite embarrassed actually of a lot of it and I was pleasantly surprised. I don't know if that's just because we chose well or whether it actually is, I do still see it the same way as I did at the time, but I was amazed at how many things I picked up, put down, picked up again, put down again as I go across the years, because you don't, I mean, I think that as I was saying earlier, I never really feel like, I've never, well, maybe more so now, but I've never really felt like I had an absolute formula or full, clear understanding of every single element of what I was doing, but I did, and I still find it quite difficult to do, very difficult to do, but seeing how at different points, I would let something go in the making of something and move to another way of seeing and then move back again, particularly just as an example, particularly with color, I never felt very confident using color. I'd always been told I wasn't really particularly a colorist, and then I had a tutor at the RA at the Royal Academy when I did my MFA who said, who I said, how do you, how's the best way to use red or blue? I mean, I find these colors really difficult, and he was an amazing man, Norman Adams, he was about 90, but he was still coming into tea, actually he was older than that, he was a conscientious objector in the war, he was, and he'd been to jail for a while, I mean, he had led this incredible life, but he was actually about, he was probably in his late 90s, and he'd come in every Wednesday to teach, and people didn't really necessarily have, think they could have that much of a dialogue with him, but he'd always come and sit and talk to me for an hour, and he was absolutely incredible, and I remember him saying, you can do anything with color, as long as you do it with conviction, and that stayed with me, I mean, it's conviction and it's science, and it's the things that you learn really early on at school when they do the color wheel with you, and you learn all about color relationships, and all of that type of knowledge that you get taught, really at a very young age, like the primary school and secondary school, and maybe at high school a little bit, at tertiary college, but you kind of drop it, you're encouraged to drop some of this knowledge when you get to a degree or to an MFA, but it's there, and you just need to learn how to apply it, and so although no one ever mentions it to you again, for me it came back so much in the last 10 years, actually just understanding how to work with color better, and everything is relative, I never really understood that until maybe the last 10 or 12 years. Yeah, I mean, you brought up the color theme which is so important, and when you look at your earlier work, it's, as you say, they are very dark colors, there's a real, a series of black paintings, sometimes being compared to Goya's black paintings, and it was more in around 2012 or so where suddenly there's a burst of colors, there's a completely different confidence to deal with color, but you continually go back to darkness, I feel, but you mentioned the color red and your tutor, and the first work in the exhibition, we've mentioned it a few times from 2003 called first, is of course this figure that faces the viewer directly, wearing this bright, bright red coat, and that color red you have talked about so interestingly, and you use it, it is repeated again and again in this exhibition, often with that same red garment, and you mentioned the influence of two painters when it comes to red, one is Walter Sickert, a British artist who lived in the Edwardian period, incidentally, we're just about to open a Sickert retrospective at Tate, so I hope you'll come, and Sickert of course had these amazing paintings, like the painting of Minnie Cunningham, a woman in a bright scarlet dress, but the other example that you've quoted is John Singer Sargent, an American painter who lived in Paris but also in London, who did this beautiful painting of Dr. Podzi, I think from 1893, again a man standing in this bright red robe, and maybe you can talk a little bit about the influence of these painters, and Sickert, I mean Sargent is a well-loved and quite famous painter, but Sickert is more in a quiet taste, he's been more in the background, and it's so interesting you're picking a painter like Sickert as a kind of influence on you. Yeah, no, I'm thinking particularly about that use of red, and because I've had a strange feeling towards Sargent in a certain way, like technically they're incredible, and I love a lot of the work, but in terms of the feeling, or the emotion and the drive somehow in it, I get, that's where for me Sickert is so important, but I, and his ability to capture these moods and emotions and scenes and a certain atmosphere that was a stronger influence on me, but specifically the painting of Dr. Podzi by Sargent, I take the, it was the scheme, the scheme in it that interested me so much, the how to make red work, I spent so much time looking at that painting and the Degas painting of the Lacroix Furs, because I wanted to understand how I was seeing the red as red, how was it, because it wasn't just, it was, I realized it wasn't as simple as taking the red out of the tube or five different reds out of the tube and blending, there was something, there was all these other relationships and so I spent a long time just staring at one thing, which is a good way to learn, and I, from that, because the main, the other thing about the focus on red was that it's always, it's a color that's always made me a bit sick, that like physically I've always, like it used to give me a headache if I saw too much of it, if I'd saw it, if I was, if we were driving, if my dad's car and I saw it in the car somewhere, I get, I'm actually, I got car sick over a lot of things, but I suddenly, I decided red was one of the things that made me car sick, because sometimes I'd be wearing red, but then sometimes I was sick when I wasn't wearing red, so maybe it wasn't, anyway, but it really, it was, there was so thinking about the Dr. Podzi painting and the story behind that painting that really captured me, the fact that he died a very kind of bloody death, he was murdered by a woman patient, I think, and who I think he, you know, a woman scorned, I think, a woman patient scorned, and the story behind it captured my imagination, it was just that thing about red just being this really hot, sickening, headache-inducing color that I, but at the same time, the way that he used it was, and the way that Degas used it, and the way that Sickot used it, it glowed, it kind of, it vibrated off the wall in a certain way, and I really fell in love with that, and so the two, there's the painting from 2003 that sort of sparked something, it was the first one that I did for my degree show at the RA that actually worked, so it started off a chain reaction to the rest of the show, and it stayed with me, but at the same time, my work really moved away from color after that, and it wasn't, I think, until about 2010 when the, what's it called? Any number of preoccupations, which is the other man in the red dressing gown, and it was wanting to revisit that, and the same, a more, what's the word? Correct color scheme, so the white is always really important to make the red not feel sickening or muddy, and so, yeah, that was that, and then the works that followed on from that, so I'm trying to remember what's in that room, but even the, yes, the woman on the, later on in the show, actually, the woman on the, leaning on the table, and that, that was... Geranium Love Song. Geranium Love Song, that's the one. Again, thinking about that sickly relationship of pink and red, and how to work with that, so a lot of it was me trying to do things that I found very difficult, yeah, then if that answered the question. The wonderful thing is that there's such precision and technicality, and what we're seeing in these paintings, and I don't know if you've ever really realized that initially, because they're so brilliantly accomplished, but you work fast, you work wet on wet, and there isn't any preparatory sketching. You're working directly on the canvas, and that really is quite an extraordinary thing. We see it very clearly here in the generosity. If you can get up close, you can see the way that these, the fabric of the socks is executed. It feels so sort of tangible on these thicker impasto areas, and you're so dedicated to the craft of painting, but I think what makes you a very exceptional artist too is the way you're thinking, not just about the mark, not just about the subject per se, but also about a mood, a feeling. I was very struck by something that the writer, Caleb Azuma Nelson, wrote about your exhibition when he'd saw it, when it was briefly able to open in London, and he said, and I'll quote him, because I think it really gets at something important here. There is no escaping the feeling of having been graced by something beautiful, by some sort of love, and I, people see you at work, they've seen these exhibitions, and they've felt them very powerfully. I know that we certainly felt it very powerfully in that period that we were working together in the difficult lockdown of 2020, but I wondered if perhaps we could talk, if it's not too difficult, about feeling and about your relationship to poetry, not just in terms of language and the written word, but also as a kind of structure of feeling for the exhibition as a whole, which I think is something quite essential here. Yeah, so in the same way that I think we look at poetry, or we read poetry, or we hear music, or we listen to lyrics and music, and we accept that we don't have to understand as such. We don't have to... What's the word I'm looking for? Rationalise. We don't have to rationalise it. I think very much the same way with painting that it's something that is felt so much more than... I mean, it's thought as well, but there's the thing that... The magic, if I can dare to use that word, the magic, and when I say magic, I mean it, the magic that I feel making it, which I hope it comes through sometimes when looking at it, but the magic that I feel making it, which is... I can't really describe it. It's without sounding too crazy, almost out of body. When your mind goes somewhere that you never saw before, or you didn't plan, and that I get that feeling listening to certain things, or seeing certain things, or being in certain places, and you can't always put it into words. I think it's... People make a lot of that, the fact of not being able to put something into words, but when I say it, I mean it quite literally, like very literally. And that's not to say that there aren't explanations in there somewhere, they're just not necessarily rational, logical. I mean, when I look at a lot of these, I remember making them. And I don't have a great memory for things, but I remember making them because I remember what they felt like to make. I keep looking at this one. And I remember what it looked like with a few marks on it. I remember it was very blue and green and brown, and I could never find that brown again. But I saw a heart shape, and I think about composition in that way a lot. Shapes and forms, and I started to see the heart shape from the two backs. Yeah, I don't know how to describe it, but trying to think about a train of thought, and when I'm fully concentrated, and when I try to say to my students a lot about a level of concentration and commitment and becoming acquainted with your language in the same way that a poet does, that you stop, and you kind of don't need to look sideways a lot with that. You need to trust yourself a little bit, but it's almost beyond intuition because you're thinking about how you see and how you see the world and how you interpret that and how it comes through in your language. And the same way that you... There's a line from a short bit of poetry at the end of a Miles Davis song where he says, can the ocean be described? And I think it's that. It's that you see the enormity of something, you feel something, and your heart understands that, your mind understands that, your body understands it, but you don't need to explain it. Yeah, I think that's a really good quote, and there are, because the whole notion of feelings and of magic I think is also connected to the fact that other writers, whether it's Sadie Smith who said they have these characters, have souls, or another critic for the Financial Times who said these paintings are vaccine for the soul. I mean, the soul is invoked a lot when people write or talk about your work. And I think, in a way, it comes through a whole number of different strategies, maybe. And one of them, perhaps, is economy because I think that is so striking about your work, is the purity and the reduction to the essential. It really concentrates. Every painting is so concentrated on the figure. You just vaguely indicate, tentatively indicate, either an interior or an exterior. And again, we're surrounded here by quite a lot of exteriors, mostly the sea, and I wonder whether that maybe also goes back to farmers. But maybe you could take us through your thinking about setting a person in what leads you to a decision, whether somebody is in an interior or an exterior. So I always just talk a lot about timelessness, about not wanting to fix anything in a particular era. So there's always a very generic use of clothing that could be potentially any time in the last 100 years, my lifetime and a bit before kind of thing. Occasionally there's more specificity, but in those moments it's linked to something very personal to me. So for example, an education, one of the paintings, I can't remember where it is actually. It's in this one, it's here. I can't remember what we've lost and what we've got. But an education, for me, evoked a time and a place and a period but more a community or an intellectual community, a grouping, a meeting of minds. And I was thinking a lot about my dad and my cousin and a number of other people who came to the UK in the 1960s and formed these kind of... Well, not formed these kind, but were very interested in academia or in books, in writing, who were studying, they were students, they'd come away from home to pursue certain things. And that's probably one of the few times when I've actually really been evoking or thinking about a specific time. For the most part, I've wanted to remove that specificity because I wanted that timelessness about the work. And it came to certain pointers, certain things I would leave out or obscure or remove altogether. And yeah, what was I saying? What was the question again? I think from Falmouth and then going back to live in a city and try to work and do various things and struggle for quite a while. And then I did a residency in Marseille in 2009, I think. And again, I was by the sea, I was in the landscape, I was looking at the light, and that got me thinking again so much about being outside and the timelessness of outside. And once you remove architecture, once you remove buildings, once you reduce it to the elements, again, something opened up for me. And I really wanted to think about these expanses of space and how that holds a body, how a place holds a person, how an environment holds him. For example, the man in the double denim on the beach. I like the fact that it was both a rock or an expanse. Is he as big as the ocean or is the perspective the way you're seeing it? And those are allusions to a certain type of time and space. I mean, the titles in those cases are kind of quite... There is a link to what you're seeing, but I was thinking more about what drove a person there, how they got there, what they were doing there and how that land is holding them. That's very beautiful. And as you were speaking, I was really struck by how very much the gaze of the figure here really looks like he's gazing lovingly at you. Maybe just the angle. But no, the gaze, of course, is something that's so important in your paintings. The gaze is out. The gaze is between figures when there are more than one in a painting. And it's been really wonderful to see the exhibition here today at Moudin to see how those gazes are different. You opened the exhibition in London with a very specific painting, Black Allegiance to the Cunning. There's very, very striking work, which is here, but not in this room. You'll know it by the fox that is underneath the chair, but it's so striking in its immediacy and it holds your attention and grabs your attention absolutely. And the figure is looking directly at you with this wonderful, open smile. And I know that when we were hanging the exhibition, and that's been very important for the team here in Luxembourg as well, that those relationships, relation to the gaze, the eyes, who's looking where is something that's really important to this exhibition and to your work generally. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that gaze. Yeah, I think when I was working on the... I mean, I'm a very old school in the way that I plan a show. It's with a wonderful cardboard model provided by Tate, a carefully constructed cardboard model. And just positioning the work, I really wanted to think about those, the directions of the gazes and the flow and the rhythm from room to room. So, because it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. And those things become a way of creating space where perhaps there is none and that the distance between people can do a lot. Even if it's implied with the gazes and the positions. But it's been wonderful to see it here because it's such a different space. I mean, sadly I wasn't able to travel to Sweden or Düsseldorf for the two shows in between. But it's wonderful to see it here because this is such a different space and such a different set of relationships that are able to come about between them because of the change in the space and the scale and the sizing of the rooms. And so, it's less clear in here but in some of the other rooms where certain things have had to change position quite drastically. They've completely moved from anywhere near where they were at Tate. And somehow there's still... Although the dynamic changes, there are still these dialogues that, like I said, create a very different sense of space and affect the rhythm of how the thing is hung and how you move through it. Yeah. Yeah, I remember you said once you're less interested in the individual painting than in the relationship between the paintings. I just want to ask one more question. Maybe we can... I don't quite know where we are with time but it would be nice to open it for questions. But I just want that you were talking about magic earlier on and I know that the inexplicable that is so part of magic is really important for you. And there is one element. You have certain elements that repeat sometimes in the painting in different forms. And animals play a very important role considering that you strip everything down to the essential. When there is another element that is not human then it has extra weight, extra symbolic weight. And Isabella mentioned two religions Black allegiance is the cunning with the fox underneath it. And so the fox, of course, a wild animal you wouldn't necessarily expect it curled up underneath you. But in the matter you have a man with an owl, there's another painting, a man with... What's Papa Guy in English? I've gone blank. Parrot, thank you. So animals play a really important, the cat, of course. So maybe you can talk a little bit about... They seem to be like familiars, like extensions of the person's character. Yeah, no, it's... I did wonder about that because I read some... I don't know, someone wrote something. I don't generally read anything that's written about the work because it starts driving you a bit crazy. If you get too into it. But I was really stunned when someone mentioned... Described it as people with their pets. And I'd never thought about it. I'd never thought of them as pets. And I thought that was very sweet. It was very sweet what they were saying but it was really... It was such an innocent reading. And I thought, wow. God, I wish I was that innocent. People and their pets. I don't know. I look at a man with a... I mean, maybe I'm just too jaded or sullied or damaged in this world. But it's not... I suppose initially I started to put the animals and the birds in because thinking back to magic and also thinking of... I wanted there to be another presence that wasn't human. I wanted another gaze that wasn't human. I wanted an interaction that wasn't with another human being. And the animals just became a really... And I've always... I have to say... I always say there's not really a very close link between the writing and the painting but I've always written about animals. Fictions, talking animals. I've always been a thing. It's a way of building a fiction through talking animals which I think it goes back to my childhood as well and the fact that my brothers used to make all my toys talk to me. All these toy rabbits... I had a legion of toy rabbits. They used to make them talk and to entertain me. And so I grew up thinking that animals talked and it stayed with me. But this idea of another being that isn't human, another gaze that isn't human, another mentality that isn't human and yet maybe is. We just don't necessarily have the same language. And in the paintings, they become... I would say less of an indication of a character and more a... How can I put it? Less indication of that person's character but perhaps an indication of another character, another mentality, another way of being in the world, another existence. And that maybe the people and the animals that they're with are somehow in league, in conversation, in understanding. And maybe just saying the same thing to you. But they're all quite... I think the uses are quite different. So the birds for me always sit very differently and allude to something very different. For example, the cat or the fox. Yeah, I don't know if I'm making any sense. I was thinking as you were talking that Elizabeth Alexander who wrote for the catalogue, which I hope you have a chance to read, wrote something very lovely, which she said, the bottomlessness of your paintings is like the bottomlessness of intimacy. We're here together in quite an intimate room and I think if we have time, we'd love to open up to you all. If you have questions you'd like to share with Lynette while we're here. We'd love to hear from you. Oh, sorry, shouting as well. No, I forgot where I was. Oh, no, I prepared them. Absolutely, no. That's something they did teach us at art school, was you have to size and prime, or just size a canvas at least. So rabbit skin glue and over-the-top oil primer for the canvases and then most of the linen canvases. These are rabbit skin glue sized. And I do it myself, mostly because I kind of know how I like them. I'm finding it increasingly difficult to do it myself because it's very tiring. But yeah, I really can't imagine letting someone else make my canvases but I think people are very angry with me about that because they just think I shouldn't be doing it. But actually, I've tried to paint on other people's... Other people have made the canvases for me or I've used stuff made by other people and it didn't feel right. My brush was rebounding or something. And you stretch your canvases yourself? Yeah, I stretch them. I've never seen an assistant in your studio. You don't have an assistant, it's just you. No, I'm very backward in that way. I was born into the wrong century, definitely. Actually, no, they had assistants, didn't they? No, it just never occurred to me to have an assistant. Yeah, I'd never say never. I'll soon be too weak to do it, I'm sure. Yeah, sure. I mean, firstly, on the men and women, I always thought it was an even split but I think I perhaps became more obsessed with a certain type of picture, a certain type of image that maybe it was more weighted towards men in the last 10 years or so. And in terms of the depiction of black figures or black life or black community or black love, I just felt there was a sense of the infinite possibility, being infinite, having every possibility in the world and not ever having to be limited to what someone else sees of you or believes you to be. For me, it wasn't even a position, it was just common sense because I've never thought about what I was, I've always thought about who I was and that's based on everything from the glory to my family and my heritage, my heritage of Ghanian heritage, being Ghanian. I see the kente in the front. But all of those things, they weren't even things I had to... I've ever felt I had to explain. I never even felt like I had to... For me, it went without saying, of course. This is the mentality I've been raised with, was like you don't... I always remember... I'm going to try and remember this right, because it's very important. But Okwi and Wezzel, the great Nigerian curator who passed away a few years ago, saying that he had to be fearless. In his position, he had to be fearless. He had to go in fearless and not feel that sense of being defined. Because he knew his... He knew. And sometimes you just need to know. And you do know. And it should never be anything that you should have to justify or explain. It's just there. So the choice was never a choice, it was just how it had to be. Yeah, I hope that answers it. Thank you. I think I'm sorry. I feel I'm polite to stop such a generous conversation. So, well, thank you very much for being there. It was a brilliant...