Around the summer of 1973 at the end of my 2nd year at the Royal College of Art something happened which I can no longer explain save to say that it was a kind of submission or surrender, supplicating all my earlier progressive concepts  at the foot of a towering simplicity.  With 1 year left of a 3 year post-graduate, it dawned on me, as if a revelation of the historically pivotal kind, that great things may be achieved simply by rendering in the most direct means  ~   in pencil, with a  brush, a stick of charcoal  ~  whatever object or corner of the banal world is in your range of vision, no clever intention was necessary.  The act of response to the visually real world by a subject (me) simply drawing and painting it in as direct and unsophisticated a style as possible seemed to me ~  over-night  ~  to be sufficient.  Sufficient!  What I remember was that it was the most exciting idea I had ever had: I couldn’t sleep at night.

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