I was hooked on the idea of getting rid of the frame. Every image ever painted had a frame; and within that frame, every image had been selected, while everything else had been omitted. It lent itself to one-moment binocular human vision. 180s allowed me to expand my vision: to see like some other animal; or to paint both space and time. Was it possible to paint 360s? At the time (2007), technology was beginning to do it for you, though at a price. And even then, it produced long thin scroll-like images. I wanted everything coherently on one standard-proportioned canvas. The answer: if 180s could be captured in one circle, 360s could be captured in two circles.

It took me a while to figure out. My first attempt — ‘Living Room, Chapel Allerton, with no one present’ — attempts to use one circle. It includes a mirror to show I’m not there. (I think it was David Hockney who once said it was impossible to paint a place with no one in it.)

My two-circle formula allowed me to paint 360s on two canvases which could then be reversed, as you can see in the gallery below. The viewer has turned around without moving! My 360s culminated in ‘S.N.E.W. York’, a large canvas that took 300 hours to complete. I used dozens of photos taken from each of the four sides of The Empire State Building for reference, along with an occasional glance of Google Earth.

After that, I wanted to take 360s into new possible directions. After the geometry of Manhattan, I turned to the amorphous snowy curves of Roundhay Park, Leeds: the fallen figure at the bottom left of the canvas is, in fact, laying beside the fallen figure on the right. In ‘Central Park’, I combine the two circles of 360 painting with a playful collage technique in which different subjects appear upside down, sideways, and all over the place. ‘Paris’ uses a similar technique as it curves its way out of a Fibonacci spiral (or an escargot). ‘Around the House in Newton’ takes us on a 360 whistlestop tour, spinning from room to room.