Another way of putting it might be to suggest that the paintings convey ongoing thinking about painting as much as, or even rather more than they appear to be conclusive—to be thought materialised and immobilised: completed.

They do not appear to be in the least immobilised or, in some sense, completed. They seem to be active. They continue to resemble thinking rather than thought.

At this stage it gets hard to avoid putting ‘painting’ in quotation marks—but to do so would miss the point.

 *       *       *       *

The word ‘gesture’ also becomes hard to avoid at this stage. Overworked and almost redundant in the toolkit of art historical commentary, it gets a strange new life when I use it in the sentence I can’t avoid:  “This painting gestures at painting.”

Judy Millar in Ian Wedde’s Get a Move On 2016