I was asked to do some entries for a competition, the Savage Club Art Prize.

The specification for the competition was that the paintings should be 9 inches by 5, so this is a tiny painting.

I find that the composition for a tiny painting has to be quite different to a large one. Without the space necessary to create a dynamic between the elements, the dynamic is created by the margins squeezing the image into its frame. And then, trucks and fences simply don't work (in my opinion) on that scale. Added to all of the above was the long skinny proportion of the thing. Very difficult.

With the same compositional problems as Muybridge Nude, Ascending, I went to a batch of photos I had taken a couple of years ago in a neighbour's shearing shed which had never quite made it to canvas (he frequently asks me what happened, and I get embarrassed, but now I can give him prints of this).

The shearer has a beautiful body, hanging from his hook. The grace of his arms, the shape of his back. I took nearly a hundred photos of him, but none of them were a painting. I don't really believe this is but maybe it works as a little, quiet thing.

The tattoo, which wasn't on his arm, is the Chinese symbol for a sheep, which is purely coincidental to the fact the shape of it works in the composition. I found it by Googling tattoos, sheep and it was much more 'artistic' than the rest of the images that came up.