Problem number two with The Secret concerned the sky. For some reason as soon as you paint a sky blue the whole history of naturalistic landscape painting falls on your head, and if you’re not interested in working within this tradition you may as well pack up and go home.

The Secret started life with a cerulean blue sky which I fiddled with, stitching it through with lighter and darker tones to try and give it movement, a kind of embroidered dynamism, which didn’t work. I decided that the reason it wasn’t working was that the tonal range between the lightest and the darkest blue was too great, it was foregrounding what was supposed, after all, to be background. So I reduced the tonal contrasts, repainted it more light blue on slightly darker blue and stood back to consider my masterpiece. Nope, still not working.

I got brave and decided to completely abandon naturalism by painting the sky pink. As any painter can tell you, this was a dumb thing to do. Why? Because the painting of the tree was largely complete, which meant that the pink paint needed to be carefully applied in the complex negative shapes around the branches and leaves. This is fiddly and takes hours and is a job that can be entirely avoided if one is sensible and decides before beginning what colour the sky should be, and sticks with it.

To cut a long story short, I painted the sky at night using halogens to illuminate the studio, and didn’t do a very good job at ‘cutting in.’ I think I was a bit tired and carried away with the idea that pink paint would save the painting. Also, at this stage, the deadline for the Despard Gallery exhibition was looming and I knew I was running out of time to finish. When I visited the studio the next morning the pink paint only looked good if I blurred my eyes and adopted an optimistic frame of mind.