“Draw your own hands. If you can draw your own hands you can do anything.” Such was the advice given to the 14 year-old Sarah Raphael by the sculptor, painter and all-round polymath Michael Ayrton. According to Ayrton’s biographer, Ayrton recognised Sarah’s seriousness of purpose even at this early age. She wanted to be an artist – she was going to be an artist – and Ayrton gave her this significant tip.  It was perceptive of Ayrton to spot this aspect of Sarah – and it has to be said she eclipsed him, artistically – but the counsel was wise, all the same, however unfashionable it may now seem. At the very root of all significant art is the notion of virtuosity: good artists are better than mediocre artists – they can draw better, they can paint better, their sense of composition is better, they can do everything better.

‘Andacht zum Kleinen’ – devotion to small things – was how Paul Klee tried to define one of the key components of his art and the phrase came strongly to my mind when I was faced with Sarah Raphael’s new work. Looking at these large refulgent canvases – all bricky ochres, bleached yellows, burnt Siennas – you may think the notion seems, at first glance, almost spectacularly invalid. Writers like to reach for a succinct authoritative quote to encourage and buttress the thrust of their argument and the last time I wrote about Sarah Raphael’s work I embellished the text with Auden’s line about landscape being but ‘the background to a torso’.