I’ve always been a Stanley Spencer fan. I like the narrative content of his paintings, particularly the figurative element. His figures in compositions have always intrigued me; even in his more grotesque paintings. There’s something about him as an artist that’s fascinating.
Like Spencer I paint a lot of self-portraits, mainly because no one will sit with me. But it’s his religious paintings that I really like. I love the way he takes religious elements and transposes them into an English village setting.
I did something similar with a commission called Raised in Leeds, which is a series of 19 illustrations of Jesus’s resurrection appearances, transposed to Leeds. Using the same thinking as Spencer, I had to imagine where each moment would happen today, how people would travel – essentially I had to find equivalent spaces in Leeds. The Damascan Road became York Road. All that came from a love of Spencer and seeing what he did with his home town of Cookham.
Eleanor Clayton curated a beautiful exhibition. It was the little things I found most interesting. One bit I really liked was the juxtaposition of two paintings. One of my favourites is The Last Supper, which takes place inside the Cookham malt house. In it you can see an open window, and the painting hung beside it, The Betrayal, shows the exterior of the malt house, with the same window visible and open at the same angle, but from the outside.
There’s also a lot of socialist utopian thinking in the exhibition. The last room showed amazing pictures of shipbuilding on the Clyde. Those paintings are a celebration of the people who lived and worked there.
It was also fascinating to see all the supporting materials. A lot of Spencer’s works were done during the war when there wasn’t much paper so he was drawing on butter wrappers and anything else he could get his hands on. To look at those initial drawings and then see how they went into the paintings was great. I loved the insight into the artistic process.
I love the fact that Spencer was so eccentric, especially now that we’re thinking about the idea of what Britain will become. Everything at the moment seems to be very negative and to see an exhibition that portrays a utopian vision of Britain was great – I left feeling very hopeful.
This private view at the Hepworth Wakefield took place on 2 July. To find out more about Guardian events sign up as a Guardian member.
