GM: If I had been able to say hello in person, I would have loved to ask you if the cigarettes in your work had any connection to Italy and Italian cinema, and I would have asked you about the time-frame that inspires you to make your paintings. They seem to me nostalgic yet very contemporary at the same time. 

PB: That’s very true. They feel of a period that is difficult to define while also feeling like they are being made now. One of my tutors at the Slade used to say they looked like they were made yesterday, 150 years ago. Ha!

It’s not timelessness exactly but I am looking for them to exist in both some sort of now AND some kind of then and that happens kind of ‘instinctively on purpose’. It is quite difficult to force it, it tends to be more by intuition than design and perhaps is more related to the colour and especially the muted, crepuscular tonality. And probably me looking at a lot of paintings from certain periods, Belgian Symbolists, Spilliaert, Sickert, Decadent art and art deco/art nouveau, the Wiener Werkstätte designs of Dagobert Peche, Aubrey Beardsley. For about a year, all I looked at was Gwen John. I don’t think I ever got over that!

The cigarette/smoker theme does have something to do with that nostalgia you talked about. I could talk about smoking all day long! Like painting itself, smoking (cigarettes) now is an oddly quaint, nostalgic, belated, anachronistic activity [i].

It is also beautiful. I mean it looks beautiful and it is beautiful to paint, unlike vaping which makes everyone look like Gandalf and offers no satisfying whisps and curlicues! It is not as romantic; it contains none of the hints of exoticism even eroticism that haunt cigarette smoking. And of course, there are no real connections to death. Cigarettes are also deeply generous in terms of temporality. Cigarettes effectively gift you time.

The few minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette, as any true smoker knows, is most satisfyingly enjoyed alone. Suddenly the smoker is absolutely in the moment, set within those few minutes, enjoying being alive and engaged in an activity that is both physical and cerebral because cigarettes for me are also an embodiment of contemplation. Again, this is where the connection to painting comes in because painting for me is absolutely a thinking space. The thinking that painting produces is often more interesting than the paintings themselves. I am interested in that ‘state’ of painting which exists somewhere between daydreaming and reading and the cigarette is a very loaded cipher for that. It also gives the figures in the paintings agency, they are ‘doing’ something (though smoking, also, isn’t actually doing anything) and, because of the allusion to thinking, it also gives them a sense of autonomy. To answer the first part of your question, not films so much in this case but certainly the remarkable chapter in Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, one of the greatest of all Italian novels, where the protagonist, Zeno talks about the problem of the last cigarette. BUT I did see this film about the philosopher Hannah Arendt which had an impact on my thinking. It wasn’t a particularly great film, but they needed to show her thinking because it was kind of her job and the subject of the film, and they did that merely by having her in a room, on a couch, on her own, looking off into the distance and very slowly smoking a cigarette.

So, again, the cigarette is a manifestation of pensiveness, of thought and most importantly of all, of reverie, daydreaming.

[i] My friend Francesco told me about this oddly moving series of filmic portraits that the French director Alain Cavalier made in the 1980’s, about older women who were still engaged, mostly in Paris, in trades or activities that were about to disappear (because of mechanisation or digitalisation etc.). They all worked with their hands, on tasks like corset making, mattress stuffing, hand stitching books and jobs like that and they were all the last people who would ever be engaged in them that way, jobs that had continued for generations. It reminded me of something Walter Benjamin said about finding new beauty in that which was vanishing and, of course, it reminded me of how odd and outmoded it often feels to be a painter.