"Like Blue Mug and Pipe or Grapefruit and Fixative, Studio Composition is like a modernist study of form and composition. It was one of a series of small works I produced that were based around the objects and tools of the studio, and can be read as conceptual or programatic games with the craft of painting and image making.

For example, the tube of paint and brushes are, obviously enough, the tools I use to make images. But because I included tubes of specific colours into the painting, and the process of still life painting is classically an observation from life, the tube of paint in the painting is the one colour I can’t use in the painting. But that one tube is also, logically, the only tube that is already the right colour to paint it. A paint painted appears as many colours, none of which is the colour of the paint itself. This is how I amuse myself."

Anthony Springford