The cultivation of (difficult) surfaces or “I know that’s a tree”

To coincide with the exhibition Real Painting at the Castlefield Gallery in Manchester Craig Staff, author of After Modernist Painting: The History of a Contemporary Practice (2013), offered his response to the exhibition, considering it in relation to painting’s histories, theories and philosophies. From connections with the Renaissance and modernism, he will venture towards the means by which we might begin to think about, if not understand the works that make up Real Painting.