Rooftop Mixer, Ochre Afternoon

This is the studio, not the hoarding — a billboard painter's rooftop in Meerut at two in the afternoon, his enamel tins crowded along a low parapet, a half-mixed bucket of chrome yellow going skin in the heat. I'm less interested in the man than in the geometry of his tools against that blown-out sky: the flat light that erases depth and turns every object into a cut-out of itself. Gouache on gessoed board, working from my own field photographs, trying to honour the same weather-argument the hoardings are having, but caught one step earlier.