The idea of studying Turner’s drawings was appealing to me because I’m most interested in his later and most concertedly non-linear paintings, and I was interested to see what kind of a connection there was between his graphic practice and these works. I have spent some time in the British Museum Prints and Drawings Room copying works on paper from a great variety of artists, and I have always found the practice of trying to get into someone else’s muscles and movements a wonderfully demanding discipline which has in turn expanded my repertoire of marks. However, in copying Turner it seemed that the marks were almost incidental, were a record of the experience of seeing rather than a feasible blueprint for a composition. This made the drawings seem at once more incidental and more crucial, as they appeared to be almost superfluous to the final full-scale paintings, and yet an essential tool informing the intelligence and sensibility intrinsic to them.