The exhibition’s title “Lean and Prop” references the artist’s profound unity with his material. To lean and to prop are the two behaviour patterns that Dawes allows, indeed welcomes to the canvas in his working process. Nick Dawes’s painting process is usually a lengthy one. It involves a gradual distillation of everything that makes a scene memorable: mood and atmosphere, feeling and emotions, bodily sensation and state of mind. In Dawes’s case, succession is signified physically by various means: by then overlay of one colour on another, by the orchestration and direction of the poured lines and shapes, by the implied sequential movements of the painter’s hand.