Jennifer Higgie interviews eight artists – Ellen Altfest, Apostolos Georgiou, Imran Qureshi, Helen Johnson, Henry Taylor, Mark Sadler, Rose Wylie, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye – about "the whys and wherefores of figurative painting."

Altfest notes: "Why paint? There’s no good reason. It’s something I’m driven to do. I’d like to make something that is both of its time and that stands outside of it. Traditional painting is a handmade process built over time and has a physical presence. It is an accumulation of gestures, colours and textures. The painted mark is at once a thing in itself and the thing that it describes. In this way, a viewer is always conscious of the painting’s making. The speed of the mark, fast or slow, and the time it takes to make a work become part of its meaning. Looking over a long time is like an attempt to merge with something outside of oneself. The dense accumulation of visual information, which is the product of this kind of looking, is different from how the lens and the eye usually see the world."