TP: Penumbra – a partial illumination or shading – could be thought of in terms of becoming, or of a disclosure or concealment of possibilities. What is it about holding moments of emergence or retreat that engages you, and in terms of the condition of your subjects?

DP: I did not go to the zoo with the intention of painting the animals (I visited the same zoo six years earlier and left uninspired), but I was fortunate to visit there in bright sunlight and at a particular time of day. I was standing by a row of enclosures that appeared empty, when I heard "clang, clang, clang", as the gates opened and the tigers began to run out into their cages one by one (someone must have been watching me on the CCTV cameras and let them out). I watched them for some time and the animals sparked a fascination in me, but aesthetically, it began with the shadows, and then more philosophically with the animals' relationship to the shadows. If no shadow had been cast, these paintings would not exist. Similarly, the reference to Penumbra, a particular area in the anatomy of a shadow, began with thinking about shadows, but became more philosophical.

Thinking about it in terms of "holding moments of emergence or retreat" would suggest the introduction of a temporal aspect in relation to the spatially confined animal, which is cast in shadow. Something that no one has picked up on is the shadows cast by the cage on the wall function as a kind of clock. Also, someone could probably geolocate the zoo based on an accurate depiction of those shadows. In that sense, the shadows could account for both time and place, and do not conceal so much, but of course, I am always thinking in more abstract terms than this.

TP: Whether through the connections between panels, or the commonalities of setting, or in the various interrelations within discrete works, is a place allotted for narrative interpretation? I am thinking rather reductively in fact (not wanting to let too much in), of the significance of implicit or underplayed temporalities, be it of animals in (slow) motion, or of the presence (depicted or otherwise) of human passers-by.

DP: Yes, some of the paintings do appear more overtly suggestive of narrative, and there is a sense of overall narrative developing across the body of work, but for me there are multiple narratives, there are fractured narratives, half-formed thoughts, along with images that eschew narrative interpretation. I am, afterall, exploring my own experiences through the medium of paint. And I do find significance in the "underplayed temporalities", that is a good way of phrasing it. The shadows, the pacing of the tigers, the restless swishing of the tail, the ageing lion, the season of winter (a cyclical concept of time) evidenced by mounds of snow (for me, snow is associative of memory, concealment and impermanence) are all evocative of the passing of time, but, clearly, the real subject is the static experience of time when confined and held captive in a cage. We can try to imagine, but probably cannot fully comprehend that.

TP: Where the gaze of the animal is directed towards the viewer, there is a striking blankness of expression oddly reminiscent of the expressions on the sitters in Édouard Manet’s paintings – a sense of looking back and beyond into an indeterminate distance. Would you agree with this? More generally, there appears to be a loneliness or sadness to these magnificent captives, or that is how one might feel prompted to reflect on their situation and situatedness?

DP: A zoo is a place of immense sadness, but to be normal is to not see or experience it. So when experiencing and painting the zoo, it was not cruelty but social-conformity and the performative aspects of life when in the face of cruelty that were at the centre of my thoughts. Somewhere there, in the ethical shadows, lies the true meaning of Penumbra, and it is a phenomenon and concern that extends well beyond the walls of a zoo.

TP: The character of the line and the way that white is used pushes beyond the requirements of verisimilitude or mere description (be it in the rendering of a cage, fence, tree, reflection, or highlight on glass). Distortions, tensions, awkwardness, great chromatic shifts from orange to blue, and passages of structural discordance co-exist alongside marked moments of linear gracefulness and the most delicate juxtapositions of colour and tonality (the patterning on the body of the beast in The Lion (for Julian) comes to mind). Art historically, in respect of the spirit of painting, I sense a kinship with El Greco, Van Gogh, and possibly Soutine. Regarding painting’s more distant past, who would you acknowledge as important influences?

DP: El Greco and also Goya are definitely the painters whose paintings I have seen in person that have had the greatest impact on me, but influence can be a strange thing. I came across a Goya painting recently. I am not sure if I have seen it in person. It's called Yard with Madmen. I was aware of this painting and his other more famous painting The Madhouse, but paintings are not something that you keep in your mind, you are reminded of paintings that you know only when you see them or someone mentions them. I found an uncanny correspondence with some of the compositions of the new paintings that I have been calling the "Tigerman" paintings with the Goya. It clearly was not conscious, but I have been thinking about why such correspondances occur. I think it is because, although separated by two hundred years, our historical ages are not so dissimilar as to be unrecognisable to us. We live in a similar condition of modernity in which the categories of institutions like zoos and mental asylums are familiar and ubiquitous. When we encounter these institutions, we encounter humans and non-human animals forced to live in an unnatural state of being, sometimes subject to cruelty and a lack of compassion, held captive by misconceived ideas and societal norms. These archetypal architectural spaces signify that we ourselves find ourselves trapped and confined by the forces of history, born into an unnatural mode of being, into rigid political, social and economic systems. So the asylum or the zoo, while presenting to us the imaginary possibility that we might find ourselves physically trapped there, also represent an analog of reality. So in these paintings we find irrationality in the shadows, escape only through the imagination, hope or solace found only in the sky, in the light and openness above.

TP: It would no doubt be tempting to project a sense of the artist's self onto the animal sitters/subjects. Yet against the backdrop of the alluded to prospect of a factual, unmediated relationship of the painter to the world, what do you see as the benefits, if any, of resisting the tendency to psychologise paintings in this way?

DP: Coincidentally, I recently came across Foucault's psychological interpretation of Goya's paintings of madhouses, in some old notes while thinking about ideas for this catalogue. He essentially puts Goya in the company of Marquis de Sade. I would definitely resist that. The thing that is interesting about Goya, perhaps like all great artists and writers, is his emotional insight as an observer, the intelligence and veracity of his critique, and his adept manoeuvring between the real and the imagined. This goes beyond psychology, it is as if the artist has positioned himself outside of the world and outside of himself.

Some of my recent paintings would definitely attract a kind of psychological interpretation. There is an aspect of self-portraiture, so it is inevitable. But neurosis is only interesting to me when it is born of historical circumstances or philosophical predicament. So Tigerman, for me, is more of a transformation which has occurred in response to history and our current situation, or that is the interpretation that I am working with now. Perhaps even more interesting are apparent crises of meaning that have no clear psychological explanation from the perspective of the onlooker. Occasionally, there are reports in the news of people climbing into the animal enclosures in zoos and being injured or killed. Sometimes it is mental illness, sometimes it is religious delusion, sometimes this behaviour is attributed to stupidity, but there are other times when there is no explanation at all, that is the story that interests me, the story that cannot be credibly explained by psychology. It raises questions around subjectivity and whether human beings experience the same reality. It certainly seems as if we are on our own and can only save ourselves.

TP: What role does photography play in your practice?

DP: I like to go back to places that are difficult to get to, mundane places, places that because of their banality and remoteness I would never have expected to go to in the first place. I go there and return to see an insignificant detail like a broken brick or a tree root, and I think to myself: I came back to see this small thing that only I know, many things are possible in life, I am here, life is affirmed. But there are times that I go back to a place that I have photographed before with the intention of taking more photographs, but I feel nothing, as if I am in a different place. I find that generally it's not possible to plan what I should photograph with the intention that it will be preparation for a painting, so I just focus on the experience, but try to photograph and record everything.

When I get back from travelling, I spend an extensive amount of time arranging the photographic material, discarding, reassessing etc. The whole process from journey to photographs to paintings is one of introspection. I am mostly trying to understand the significance of the experiences I had at the time of taking the photograph, and why some images seem to hold some kind of meaning or mystery for me. I have relived my journeys several times over just by looking through the photographs I have taken. So photography allows me to remember what I have seen, and forms a bridge between life and painting. The fact I take so many photographs allows me to repeat variations of the same subjects and it is through this repetition that the direction of my painting evolves. I can take the paintings off in different directions concurrently, define images or not. None of this would be possible through the appropriation of images, and there would be no meaning for me in that.

TP: And so, could you expand on the nature or dynamics of the relationship between the seen (as seen) and the imagined? Which do you privilege, and why?

DP: When I remember the past, walking around cities, often it seems to me that there was nobody else there. I remember the streets as almost empty, clearly that is not possible. I feel like I am remembering my experience and the things I saw, but am I remembering or reimagining? Conversely, at the time of my experiences at the zoo (the basis for these paintings) there actually was no one else there, both times I visited, the zoo was empty of people, no other visitors, perhaps just brief glimpses of an occasional zoo worker scurrying around in the background, so, ironically, it feels like I could have imagined the whole experience, but I know I didn’t, the photographs show I was there.

The smoking figure that repeats in several of these paintings was someone I photographed out in the street, so the subject has its basis in reality, but I put him in the zoo. He was not there, it is fiction. I also considered putting other figures/people into the landscape of the zoo, just like I did with the photographs of my own body for the Tigerman and Transformation paintings, so the paintings are not so much about a real or particular place. I would say they are more about the current historical moment, but this is a function of the creative process, in which imagination is a route to finding meaning rather than simply representing it. Everything is real and at the same time is fiction, that is the sense I have. Meaning is emergent, and its emergence is akin to the experiences we have in reverie and dreaming. It's a part of how I make sense of my life as a human at this historical juncture. The significance of dreaming has become more important to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the sense of historical unreality that has pervaded since the pandemic began.

TP: Do you make use of preliminary drawings or studies, and/or to what extent do the paintings develop, as Francis Bacon put it in, "in the working"?

DP: When I go back to London, I always go to the Victoria & Albert Museum mostly to see the Raphael Cartoons, which are essentially large preparatory works that are masterpieces in themselves. When I am there, I also go upstairs to see the Constable rooms. As you know, they have a couple of rooms with his sketches, small paintings and a few larger paintings, but what I actually find interesting is the larger full size oil sketches that he made, which are essentially, a more urgent, looser version of his paintings, they are preliminary work, but they are the same size as the more "finished" work. It is so easy to be engrossed in pleasure when looking at them that I sometimes wonder if the "sketch" is made for the "painting" or is it the other way around, because that is the way it is with my own work. I see less of a hierarchy, everything is a study, in a sense, and everything is a final work. I consider some of the larger works and materially heavy works more as sketches, but they took much longer than some paintings, which appear to be more "finished" works. I did not set out with the idea that this painting would be preparation for another, it is more about what I learned through the process. There was an extended period this year when I was working on about four really heavy (thick) paintings. Painting was exhausting, like I was wearing heavy clothes, really slow, discontinuous, and doubt was creeping in. I think only one of those paintings survived, but once I had been through that experience, creatively I felt I had broken through, so it was necessary.

TP: The scale is for the most part large, the handling energetic, and the materiality of surfaces pronounced. Could you say something about your approach to the physicality (or physicalities) of painting, and to how this relates or otherwise to your subject matter?

DP: Some people might say my paintings are large, but how big are your thoughts and dreams? How would you put them out into the world and represent them? How would you go about interrogating them outside of your own body? It is a problem. And when looking at art, sure, you can become absorbed in a small drawing or a reproduction in a book, pin a postcard to the wall that gives you pleasure or makes you feel or think something, but you can also encounter images out in the world as you move around. The world is like an image that wraps around us and paintings are a part of that world.

As you know from when we shared a studio at the art school in Liverpool thirty years ago, I’ve always worked on a scale that is considered large, but I do not think of them that way.The Raphael Cartoons, which I mentioned earlier, Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar (which I saw exhibited at the Royal Academy in the early 90s) and paintings in the Louvre that are much larger, Gericault's Raft, for example. It is irrelevant to me, because I am generally not making paintings to sell or for an exhibition and haven't been for some time. I am making paintings out of some kind of personal necessity, because I feel they should exist, because I want to confront and be confronted by the image out in the world. As an artist, if society does not value what you do, you have to find a way to do it anyway. I have a limited number of years left in which to give my work to the world, all I have to lose is time and creative opportunity, nothing else. Ironically, this is a freedom, which many more successful artists apparently do not have.

TP: Wild animals (tigers and lions especially) as subject matter might to some point towards manifestly environmentalist or conservationist concerns, which would serve to situate these pictures of among the last of the big cats as elegiac ruminations on extinction or the absurdity of survival, or else as cautionary warnings of something perhaps even worse to come. Would such readings be misplaced?

DP: I recently recalled what I believe is my first memory of visiting a zoo. I would probably have been 8 or 9 years old and we had had a normal day at the zoo. It was in a different city, and we were sitting on the bus waiting to leave when suddenly the police came on to the bus and started searching around. There was a kid at the back of the bus who was sitting with his coat zipped up. I do not know how, but he had stolen a baby penguin and had hid it under his coat. The police took him off the bus and we left without him. At the time, we all viewed him as a criminal, but it has occurred to me that perhaps his actions were misunderstood. Perhaps in this mind, he was saving or liberating the bird. Perhaps, he was going to release it like some people do with the goldfish that they win at funfairs when they let the fish go in a river not realising the animal will perish. These are the consequences of intervening in nature, pursuing misconceived courses of action, inadvertently enacting a destructive form of conservation, and so it is the same with the concept of a zoos: the collective preservation of species, to the detriment of other species, and to the detriment of the sanity and well being of the individual captives of the zoo. At the zoo, you can break the glass, step into the blizzard, be devoured, but there is no escape for the animal, no space encroached by man and industry, no route out of modernity, there are only zoos within zoos.

There are some parallels between the boy who stole the penguin and the character Billy Casper, the boy in Ken Loach's film Kes who finds a kestrel and with it finds meaning in the world. This was an important film for me. I watched it when I was young and it reflected the conditions of the working class education system in the north of England, which I was to experience myself a few years later. When one is trapped in such an institution, I discovered there are only two paths out of the maze: nature and culture. Fortunately, nature was accessible on trips to the moors with a schoolteacher and trips to Derbyshire or the Lake District with my father. But I found culture was rendered inaccessible to me throughout much of my education. I was often underestimated, perhaps because I am not a conventional thinker and lacked social skills. At school, I was placed in one of the lower sets for English. I remember looking out of the window at the other class where an impassioned teacher was teaching Chaucer and William Golding, while in my classroom the teacher refused to teach the class because the class was so unruly, and just gave us all a book to read, it was a book written for teenagers about aliens. I looked through the window and I wanted to break the glass. It was then that my self-education began.

TP: Often, in your past work especially, an isolated figure is absorbed in looking, or smoking, or else passes by. Why does it remain desirable to paint the figure (human or otherwise) today? Or put another way, what do representations of the figure offer you, and offer to painting?

DP: It is partly a function of painting in relative obscurity for so many years, that I came to realise that my art will only survive if its meaning is not external to the work. If you have the distinct feeling of being outside society then you do not create art that is dependent on the ideological whims of society in order to be understood and appreciated. The stakes are higher, the risks of painting are existential. You start thinking about what is fundamental in art for human beings. After finding yourself in this predicament for so many years, chronically excluded from the art historical process, there is only one option: translate life. Translate life through art in an attempt to understand the marginality of your own situation and use the perspective that this grants to find symbols that critique and reflect our time.

A painting has to be so that if it were to emerge from the ground of a landfill site one hundred years from now, another human being would be able to look at it and recognize something of their own condition in the work. That does not mean the work is facile or self-explanatory, it does not necessarily have to be figurative, but that is one aspect of it for me. It just means the work acknowledges the complexity and difficulty of the transfer and endurance of meaning, and the problem of being human and finding meaning through art. It is clearly a very natural thing for humans to paint other humans and animals, as evidenced by the first cave paintings, and I do not think art has changed as much as people think it has since then. Some of us still paint ourselves and the inhabitants of our universe. History shows us that prevailing ideas which seem immutable are too easily evaporated by bombs, plagues and tyrants who impose self-serving epistemologies. In the event that as a consequence of our own violence and irrationality, we have reduced the world we have constructed to rubble, I hope my work will be appreciated by the cavemen of the future. If the viewer exists for me, that is probably who it is.