Unexpected Views- Dexter Dalwood on Joshua Reynolds and English painting - National Gallery - YouTube

I'm an artist and I'm standing in the English painting room in the National Gallery just before I give a talk about English painting. Welcome everybody, thank you so much for joining us. My name is Priyesh Mistry, I'm the Associate Curator for Contemporary Projects here at the National Gallery. I've got this enviable job of working with living artists to commission them to hold talks within this fantastic collection here at the National Gallery. This is a fantastic series that we have here called The Unexpected View. It's a programme where we invite an artist in to choose a work or choose a room, a part of the collection to talk about the work but also talk about their own practices and find the kind of relationships between them, the ways that we might understand how both artists work in history but also how contemporary artists work today in the myriad of ways that they do. Tonight is a very special evening because we are joined by the formidable painter, Dexter Dawood. You are a formidable painter, brilliant. And Dexter has a very close relationship to the National Gallery which I will go into a bit later. But it's great that actually we're standing here in amongst our British pictures in front of a painting by Joshua Reynolds of a portrait of Captain Robert Orme. It's showing this kind of heroic moment just after a battle but we're also surrounded by other masterpieces of this kind of British canon. Before I continue and introduce Dexter more formally, we should thank as ever Hiscox as the National Gallery's contemporary art partner for their support of this evening. Dexter Dawood is a British artist renowned for his engagement with contemporary history painting for over three decades. Dexter translates real world events into imagined and composite landscapes. With an acute understanding and referencing of past artistic genres, the language of Dexter's paintings are unique, often evading figurative and immediately legible representational forms in favour of uninhabited and uncertain spatial concerns, shifting scales and compressed picture planes. I hope in our conversation we'll touch on his approach to the idea of history painting as a contemporary genre and the importance of time and memory as touchstones for creating new era-defining images. Dexter now lives and works in Mexico City. In 2017 he undertook a residency in Oaxaca and made a series titled An Inadequate Painted History of Mexico when he returned back to London, which has since featured in touring exhibitions and major solo exhibitions. I was going to go into exhibition history, Dexter, but rather than listing everything, just to say that Dexter shows frequently internationally and is held in many collections, including significant collections here in the UK as well. Dexter has a close relationship with the National Gallery, as I mentioned before, because he sat as a trustee for many years on our board, as well as serving on many other boards in the UK. The Tate board was a liaison trustee between the two museums as well for a period. And his relationship doesn't end since he stopped being a trustee, but continues, as Dexter is co-curating an exhibition with my colleague Daniel Ralston on the Mexican landscape painter Jose Velasco, which will open next year. Dexter has just opened an exhibition with a new body of work titled English Painting at the Listen Gallery, which I encourage you all to go over and see. And that kind of really starts off our kind of conversation here and how we've landed in the British galleries in the rain. But I wondered if we could start by talking about that new body of work and why you decided to approach this idea of Englishness. Thank you for joining us this evening. Thank you. Thank you all for coming, and thank you for the introduction, Pierre. I think it would be good if I kind of just say kind of what started this off, because in a way, I happen to live in Mexico City. Actually, living in Mexico City for the last three years has really been the effect of starting to think about Englishness and the idea of what that could be if I was going to make some paintings related to that. But it really came from the kind of germ of an idea I had a few years ago, where the American 20th century painter Alex Katz had done an exhibition in Tate St. Ives. And as part of the thing, when you do an exhibition at Tate St. Ives, you create a bit of the Tate collection and show works which you pick and put together in a sort of new display. And he picked a painting by Thomas Lawrence, Thomas Lawrence painting over there in that right-hand corner. Not that painting, obviously, because it came from Tate. We'll talk about the confusion of British art at Tate and here and other collections. And he said something which really kind of struck a chord with me in a way. He said that the thing that Lawrence has, he has that inherent thing that English painting has. And that thing is elegance. And when he said that, I thought, I'd never heard an American artist talk about English painting or mention someone, especially like a mid-19th century English painter. And it made me think that thing where, actually, if you think about quintessentially what is interesting about English art in a way, there is a sort of inherent elegance when it's good. And I think that we're sitting in a room that has some of the hits, if you like. But I think also we should talk a little bit about, behind me, Joshua Reynolds, who was so phenomenally influential in that period in the late 18th century, when he released his discourses, lectures which were over a period of time, which he basically came out with, this is how you should think about painting, which was also based on a kind of 16th century Italian version of painting, but it was to do with the hierarchy of genres. And this is the thing which I'm kind of interested in when we're talking about English painting, Spanish painting, French painting. What is it? And I think that when someone says Spanish painting, for example, you immediately think of Velázquez, Goya, and perhaps even Picasso. And there's not a problem with where you locate it. And I think French painting is the same. English painting is more problematic. And one of the reasons it's more problematic is because it had several breaks. And I think one of the biggest things, the enormous wounds that happened with English painting in this country was the Reformation. Previously we had an extraordinary country full of churches painted with murals. And when the Reformation came, all that was destroyed and only continued in illuminated manuscripts. And then, in the 16th century, they were kind of anti-art in a way, but the artists they did bring to England were mostly from Europe. So Holbein comes over, Van Dyck comes over. And the portrait, the miniature portrait, became the most popular form of art in England for a long, long time. So I think that's the... And also in this hierarchy of genres is this odd list which now seems very antiquated. And the list was... Number one was history painting. That was the goal. The goal was to make history painting to the idea that you would include mythological stories, but the whole thing would be to do with an idea of a sort of moral code which lifts the public. And then there was genre painting, which was painting of everyday life, which you could also include Hogarth in that. Then the list kind of starts to go down. They go to portraiture. And obviously portraiture was so important in the 18th and 19th century because it was the only real way that artists made any money, in terms of commissioned work. Then we have landscape. Then we have animal portraiture. And then we have still life. So those are the kind of ascending priority. And landscape painting was not, especially in the late 18th century, early 19th century, was not seen to be an important art to be making. It was a lower category. And what's so interesting now, of course, in terms of talking about that period of time, we are the landscape painters who are basically Constable and Turner who represent English in terms of the 19th century and now are the most famous artists of this country in terms of that period of history. And yet it wasn't really like that in terms of what was happening in the early 19th century. So I think that's one thing. And the other thing, I think, just before I go on to why I'm kind of thinking about Englishness itself, is that in a way this room, the paintings in this room, are a representation of the power of the Royal Academy when it was in its heyday. To become a Royal Academician, there are only 40 of them, if you were in, you've got commissions, you've got work, and you were basically able to be a professional artist. If you weren't in, you struggled like crazy. So in a way, what we see here in terms of acquisitions, in terms of representation of that period, actually is the artists who were, on the whole, members of the RA. And then I think that when you think of that period, we haven't got here William Blake, we haven't got Samuel Palmer, we haven't got various other women artists who were not seen as part of the canon at that time at all. So in some ways, it's a strange collection as well, because this room represents that, but also if you think of English painting in this country, when it's what's at Tate, for example, what's also in other collections and private collections, there's an enormous amount which isn't represented in this room. So in a way, this room is kind of an example of buying power and also the power of the Academy. And also one that's really tied with the history of the National Gallery as well. So when the Gallery first moved into this building in 1838, I think? Well, it was first in a smaller building on Pall Mall before then the founding painters of the museum petitioned the government to build this building that we're in. And originally, half the Gallery was dedicated to pictures, the founding collection, and the other half was the Royal Academy. And there was this ethos that the collection would be founded for artists, for painters to learn from the old masters. So when I talk very much about our relationship with contemporary artists, I say it spans back two centuries because of that relationship. And in a way, it makes sense for the history of the Gallery that many of those Royal Academicians are now also part of the collection hanging here. So it's a story that also relates partly to the history of the Gallery and the sort of dynamics of that period as well, the formation of this kind of art network and that economy. It's interesting that we are standing in front of Reynolds because Reynolds, as you mentioned, was one of the founding members of the Royal Academy, but he was also the first president of the Royal Academy. And you mentioned his discourses. These were a series of lectures that became a publication that he delivered in his role as the president of the Royal Academy. And he's very much seen as the person to establish what we understand as both a hierarchy but what English painting might be. And I guess it's from his legacy that we talk about what English painting or British painting might be from then on, because it was seen as the heyday of a kind of reinterpretation of this idea of Grand Manor painting for a British audience, what it might be to have a British Academy in a way of a new style of painting. I think that's true, but also I think if you think about it, people can move on to talking about history painting. Generally, actually the British weren't particularly good at it. There's a reason why there aren't any enormous history paintings. The French were extremely good at it. So it was like, although everybody wanted to aspire to this, and there's also a lot of pomp and nonsense, paintings are very hard to look at and think about and interpret in a way that portraiture works in a certain way, landscape works in a certain way, because it's accessible. And I think that the interesting thing about history painting historically is you had to kind of, it was like something you decoded. So you kind of worked out if they were wearing, if they were dressed up in togas or whatever, if it was some mythological thing or if it was some Greek myth, or you had to sort of know that. And you would know that. The audience was basically educating it, so they'd come along, they'd tick it off, and it would just do that. But it was a very coded thing, and there were things about this idea of kind of quasi-spirituality, and then also obviously religion comes into it in a different sort of way. But what's so interesting, in a way, for me, was that in this, in England, for example, the Slade School of Art had, up until 1960, they still had an award for history painting where it actually, you know, really history painting ended, in terms of the grand manner, you know, by mid-late 19th century. There wasn't really anyone doing it into the 20th century. So it's interesting that kind of remains a residual thing. But for me, there are a lot of contemporary 20th century artists who kind of kept that going. And I was very interested in how the difference of, you know, what, if you think about what history painting was and then what can it be now, it's this idea that its role is a completely different thing, because now it's the idea of the kind of subjective documentation of something, but also, hopefully, bringing in all these different references to make the viewer think about the relationship of why am I looking at this image now, and what is it making me think about in terms of this event slash moment. How did you first come to it through your work, and how did it first enter into your way of approaching painting? I think by default, in a way, because, I mean, I started off... I mean, when I kind of... The moment things locked into place for me were when I started making these interiors, really, for sort of historical or 20th century people, usually, the idea of making a space which wasn't representing them. It was just the idea of inventing the idea of a fictional room, like Solzhenitsyn's reading room, or Paisley Park, which was Prince's recording studio. These were often places I'd read descriptions of that they weren't actually photographs of, so it was the idea of making a painting which kind of represented that in a way. But I wasn't particularly interested by the history of painting until I think I made a very big painting about the death of Brian Jones, where he drowned in the swimming pool, quite mysteriously, in the... I can't remember where it is. It's in a suburb outside London, which was interesting. The house used to be owned by A. A. Milner, not Winnie the Pooh, so it was that example of a kind of weird cross-cultural moment, and I'd used an abstract surface of the painting by Clifford Still, the American abstract painter, to create the walls of the swimming pool, and I think at that moment that someone said to me, you know you're making contemporary history painting, so when I thought, OK, perhaps I am, and then when I started to think of that as the focus, things then kind of really got very exciting, because then there's the idea of how to do a version of something like The Deluge, for example. The Deluge is a very common theme and a great one of Turner's, and how to do that in a contemporary way. So then the idea was, I think, doing something about Hurricane Katrina, and making an enormous painting, and the wave in the painting was a kind of Roy Lichtenstein brushstroke, and it was crashing into a kind of Guston Sea, and this idea that, you know, actually also that painting itself has its own history. What I mean by that is that idea that when you see something quoted and recycled, it works in a very different way than it did when it actually came out. So you're historically sampling something and saying, do you remember that? Do you remember that thing? Remember when it had that impact? And now it hasn't got that impact. Like, Clifford Still, for example, when he made those abstract things, he famously said, he had a show in Paris, he said, when those paintings landed in France, they could fill tremors all the way to the Premier. So the idea that painting had that kind of power, or he thought it did, which now becomes, you know, it's a kind of ridiculous or bombastic joke, in a way. So that was the sort of, and I became very, very interested in it, and I've written about it as well, actually, but I think what's happened in the last few years, especially when I went to Mexico, and then came back and started to make a whole series of paintings which was about Mexican history, which had nothing to do with me, really. And in the end, the show was called that, Estinomio Papanese, which means, this has nothing to do with me, you know. This doesn't belong to me. Because the idea, like, coming in from, coming from the outside and seeing something, but then also thinking, well, if I was to think about this moment, these moments, these historical moments, how would it look? What would it look like? And how would you use painting to make that an interesting possibility? And then, so when that ended, and I was in Mexico, because I made all those paintings here, then there's this whole thing of, I think, the idea of distance, and when you're not connected with the thing you're actually painting and thinking about, you're distanced from it, so it becomes removed. Then there's a whole different thing comes in. So I started this series, this show which is on now, at the end of 22, beginning of 23, and it really became an obsession, this thinking about, well, if I was to think about English painting, well, what is it to me? And then, of course, I think the thing with influence is that the mistake of talking about influence in terms of other paintings which influence you as a painter, that's one thing. But actually, for me, I think that the experience in my life is that although painting has been, once I found painting, I played with no reverse gear, but at the same time, it's that thing of being able to suddenly play with the form of it, play with the form of it and then, but thinking that, well, I can also include other things which are, all the other things are interesting, because I always thought as an artist when I was at art school that the idea, if you get fixed making a type of painting, like if you're the sort of guy, you're the one who does the stripes, you do a degree show and it's the stripe painting, you do that for your MA, but you change it a bit, and then three years later, you're still doing stripes, but you get into this cul-de-sac and you run out of connecting with your life in the way that I always thought that making art should be, that you're making stuff that you're interested in. You're interested in the way that, I'm interested in poetry, writing, music, and all those other things that you can somehow bring that in and make art almost a bit more like a musician when you're thinking of making an album. You're making, I'm going to make these 10, 12 songs, and then when that's done, I might move on to something else. It gives you this chance and this possibility to keep working with your imagination and being able to suddenly alight on a subject which then you think, oh wow, yeah. With this English painting thing, I thought a lot about growing up. I grew up in Bristol. I moved to London when I was 17 and I was in a punk band very briefly. I had a 18-month meteoric crash and burn career. Also, that point in time, which is very exciting to be alive and be a part of it, has now, in terms of history, become solidified and there's a version of it which is now written up. Also, in my own lifetime, I don't quite recognize that, what I went through, and I think that that moment is kind of over. The first painting in the show is called Punk is Dead. The idea that that is, I can guarantee you, whatever that was, is no longer exists. That moment in time is finished. From there, I really started, again, also thinking about the idea of genre painting because I thought that with including works in the show about English painting, I had to include a portrait, a landscape, something to do with horses, and also something to do with a kind of spooky... I think that there's the idea of Englishness as well. It's kind of this slightly mystical doom which kind of creeps in. I think it's in lots of 19th century poetry. And then, of course, the Pre-Raphaelites, who you may notice there's no major inclusion of the Pre-Raphaelites in this collection. Where they sit and how people hate or love them is a kind of strange anomaly, but they are also this kind of fantasy art at a point when artists really wanted to get away and escape and think about a time before because of what was the horrific reality of late 19th century industrialization. And also, those things are very interesting to me because you think about the relationship of history and the moment those people are making work which either have nothing to do with what they're observing or is a complete fantasy away from it. I think the example of Turner and Ponson was a great one because Turner, in a way, even in these paintings the Fighting Temeraire and Winstead, is it here? Winstead, yeah. Over there, are both paintings about that moment in time. One is the end of the idea of the great age of the British Navy in terms of the tall ships and the other is the advent of the railways. Constable hasn't got any of that. Constable's just like I don't want any of it. I'm just like, I like it, I want to keep it as it was when I was a kid. That's what I want to do. But at the same time, the way he painted was very proto-impressionist and very interesting but the subject is deliberately against what he's witnessing. And, just to bring in the artist who we're bringing to the National Gallery next year, Jose Maria Velasco, is why he's so interesting is because he's someone who was completely documenting what was happening in the Valley of Mexico. His idea of the beginning of industrialization and thinking about the past and thinking about the idea of the relationship of science to making art. And I think that's another thing that the underlying sort of research-based practice that goes behind certain artists and doesn't behind others is also a very interesting thing to think about in that period. But also, I think it's something, well, I mean, I want to bring it back to this portrait behind us because I find it quite unusual as a painter. It's this interesting idea around how artists reference and take from different moments whether that is about taking, being influenced by artists that came before them, taking forms. Reynolds was notorious for doing that and quoting from classical imagery from the Baroque, from the High Renaissance and reinterpreting those kind of forms, those gestures, those compositions. There's also this idea of kind of referencing those moments of history, those points of significant moments that might happen within current affairs or within the world as international moments of significance that actually we might be distanced from and perhaps this is kind of a good example. We talk of this as a portrait but this was never commissioned by Robert Orme or his family. It was very much an initiative by Reynolds to show as an example of a heroic portrait that he would hang in his studio for prospective patrons to come and look at. So for me, it sits between the idea of almost between genres. Trying to be something of a history painting, showing the moment just after this battle when Orme is taking this kind of missive, this note about this defeat within the battle and he sat for Reynolds I think a few months after he returned to the UK and decided to depict this moment because he was a sort of name that was in the news at the time and he thought it would be an interesting project or painting to show. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the idea of and perhaps in your work as well that the mode of referencing and taking from different sources and putting them together into one sort of work. I think when you talk about that painting as well I think the thing is that Reynolds didn't really like observation and he wanted everything to be high art and that was the goal. He wasn't really crowned on the idea of people just rendering from nature. Which I do a bit as well. But I think when you think of Gainsborough and the idea they used to make the landscape out of bits of broccoli. They used to do it in the studio and light up the candles and that whole idea of plein air painting was not a thing. It wasn't a thing It didn't have any idea of truth in it in the same way. The idea that these things were still carrying these moral and high ideals but then also it also ends up being stodgy and in the end how well is it painted? And in a way when you talk about what this painting is about it's echoed also in Spanish painting and print painting of the time done in a much more sophisticated way. When I'm looking at a painting and I go into a gallery I'm kind of interested why is this painting being made in 2025? What are the concerns of it? What is it trying to do? What does it want you to think about? And how is the artist considering the surface? How are they thinking about all the concerns which were everything which this century wasn't about. It's all the post 1902 period where suddenly the picture playing in paintings changed forever. Is that those concerns are also there. But for me I was told before is that how you kind of get a piece of another artist and try and use it in a painting to evoke something is something I'm more interested in than actually naming it. Can we talk about one painting in your show? Track and Turf which is the diptych which references Stubbs but also references a Reynolds painting. And maybe talk about how that sort of functions in a way that actually references a particular detail from a Reynolds painting. Yeah, I mean there's two paintings it's called Track and Turf. One is basically the date 1754 the numbers falling from the sky into this kind of racing green kind of field like a murky kind of field in Lincolnshire in my head in 1754. And then I wanted to do a painting about Stubbs which didn't include a Stubbs painting because again it's like this idea of trying to get an idea of Stubbs without it being trying to paint a bit of that or trying to paint one of these odd stiff figures and then holding onto a cart horse or something like that. And in a way it's this kind of sadness of horse portraiture because in a way animal horse portraiture is a kind of depiction of power and ownership and that's kind of what people wanted their horses painted and also they loved to have you know those paintings shown to other people these are what they owned this was an incredible race horse they had and it was all to do with that. So in a way with Reynolds this painting and a sister painting which is in the Metropolitan actually there's another figure he has which is standing much closer to a horse but is pulling the horse down also much more so his boots are there but the horse's head is in abeyance in a way. So I did use on a smaller panel a version of that which is that kind of it's very distressed looking painting but the horse it does have a horse's head in it so I just I always wanted just the idea of saying okay field date horse and then it's stubs because it's 1754 when he was in those barns in Lincolnshire drawing skeletons of horses and dissecting them all on his own and he ended up being the best painter probably ever in a way but it was like a very peculiar slightly spooky pursuit. I think there's also other ways that you've kind of approached this other sort of forms other ways of kind of using different references but also playing on that ambiguity as well you know the ambiguity of space or place is there another painting that you sort of actually really enjoyed producing and showed that you well there's a train of thought which ended up being three different paintings I'll just include this story because I think it's kind of an interesting sort of fantasy kind of what I was talking about the idea of the Pre-Raphaelites is that there's a whole point in time when I was growing up in the early seventies my stepbrother was much older than me he had his hair down to here you know he had like brushed denim jacket and all that and there was also this kind of fascination with the occult it was massive it was a really big thing this crossover between Black Sabbath early Zeppelin and many other bands but also there was a kind of obsession with the occult and a serious occult not the idea of like magicians but Aleister Crowley for example of this late nineteenth century sort of philosopher slash eccentric brilliant mind but also was obsessed with the idea of like bringing up this kind of godhead rituals that could bring the devil into the incarnate so they were obsessed with him and he built this house on Loch Ness which then he did this ceremony in which he tried to bring up this thing where you had to spend nine days and eventually the devil in his incarnate whatever followers come into the house and you complete the whole ceremony and he would disappear again I think seven days in he got called to Paris for some reason so he left and the house was meant to be possessed from then on but it's burnt down four times but I was very interested in that moment then I found out that Jimmy Page the guitar player of Led Zeppelin bought that house and actually tried to live in it but he couldn't really live in it but he did record an extraordinary track in it called Bollyskin Harris 1973 which is like some spooky very disturbing thing and then when I was thinking about all this so I did make a painting called Avalon which is based on Burne Jones's 15 foot painting which is called The Last Resting Place in Avalon which he made in the last ten years of his life as he described because he had gone out of fashion he used to say to people the rage for me is over but he was painting this painting until he died and people would visit thinking was he in the painting or was he painting his own death so I included a reflection of that on an oak tree and I felt that in my mind it became that thing of thinking about that period and also thinking about making paintings myself in the 1980s when everyone was copying George Basilisk when I was at college so sometimes it's significant and sometimes it's completely arbitrary but the idea of subjectively sort of collaging these things together as ideas which then makes me start to think about how to make the images so it's always brainstorming away and depicting the obvious in my head anyway it's interesting hearing you talk about that, I was thinking very much about actually this idea of history painting being a sort of adaptation of this idea of memory and memory being something that actually in a painterly form is something you can't really trust it's not something that came before perhaps a slight tangent but in diaspora studies we talk a lot about this about the idea of what a distance memory might be of a certain kind of heritage is there something in that about picking up this idea of memory as a form of escapism perhaps both in the mysticism that you referenced and the idea of melancholia as a way of exploring some of those thoughts I think so also I think yes to that but also I think it's this thing of what I'm sort of saying is how different flavours of things affect different periods of time and also how strong that was at a point and now it's no longer there and also I think with art making as well there's a problem of how to make great art about a very difficult subject as well because I think if you look at all the art produced during the Vietnam War for example there's not a lot which stands up to me if you think about the idea at the time it thought that was the most important thing to do but yes it may have been but then the problem with that making it kind of specific about a particular event in a particular time is it may not stand the test of time in terms of formally how that thing was made there's no particular interest in it it's just a message and I think that's another thing which is tricky but I think when we talk about music expanding out music and the idea of different influences because I felt that a big part of this show is to bring in one very enormous painting called Rise Up which is this speaker system is that when I grew up in Bristol there was a West Indian community there and reggae and dub was like it wasn't something which you kind of went to it was just there continually so it was part of my early life and it was a part of affecting everyone in that city who was young and interested in music in terms of their interests and how it would go into the future but it wasn't a marginalised thing it was in the centre and then how music now certainly has become marginalised again whereas I think obviously pre-internet there was a more tribal allegiance which you had to find your way by thinking well I'm this and I'm also kind of interested in that but I think I'm going to go in with this lot because if I was dressing up like that I don't think that's particularly great but I think it's obviously very human previously maybe that's a good way to round back to the idea of us being in this room surrounded by painters who were part of this club this Royal Academy in a way of trying to find a way of conforming to this idea of what a British painting might be I think also if you look above you see the names in the arches so at the time this gallery was built these were the names which were put into incarcerated into the building and some of them now are of course very unknown or very dropped completely out of obscure arches including the first director of the Nassau Gallery Charles Eastlake who was a painter to start with and then kind of eased off with his own work as he became more and more a very ambitious director also included himself in the architecture where it concluded when it was made included within this context when it was still probably left after him but the idea that that name is equal to the other names and actually there's much fewer names that we actually recognize but I think you know again what we're witnessing now in terms of art history is this enormous shift in revisionist thinking about actually what we thought was art history 15 years ago is no longer still relevant in the same way. So I think now also this in a way is a mausoleum as well as a museum in the way that it's constructed and showing a collection which at a point in time had a kind of significant trajectory in saying this is what happened and now it's like well yes but also there were all those others who aren't included here which need to be then reaffirmed and put back into it. So that's why I'm interested in that thing with José Miguel Velasco. He's a painter making art in Mexico City roughly the same time as Cézanne and it's kind of a fascinating thing to think about him in relationship to what was happening in Europe in 1814 to 1912 because then you see oh here was someone who really had an incredible mind behind what he wanted you to think about when you look at his painting. Brilliant. I think that's the perfect place to end our conversation Dexter. So I hope that's wet your tongue to come back next year in March when our Velasco show opens. We welcome you all back then but in the meantime please join me in thanking Dexter for this talk this evening. Thank you Cézanne.