“Estelle tells me how, experimenting with a cobalt-violet paint, she painted a surface sixty times before it was right. How since the arrival on the island of volcanic ash from the St Vincent Soufrière eruption, she’s been collecting ash to make into paint. How early in her career she had to evolve her own way of laying on paint, using rollers to avoid brushstrokes, so as to bring out the shimmer and luminosity she’s aiming for. So as to release the light.

‘What I love about painting is that when you stand with a painting you experience the light of the world,’ she says.”

Jane Bryce

The materiality of abstraction: a response to paintings by Estelle Thompson