In early April, the day after I heard that Gillian had died, I listened to some archive recordings, Artists' Lives, excellent interviews with Mel Gooding, who knew her well. I must have wanted the illusion of being in her company again, hearing that inimitable voice, the pitch and pace of it, her chuckle. In one of the tapes she is hilarious about housekeeping, or rather the lack of it, and furious about what bureaucracy did to art schools; then she says something wonderful about “the secret inside painting, not to be spoken of too much, to be kept at the back of the mind so that it stays as questioning, as searching, as hope within us”. This was Mali Morris writing in 2018 in tribute to the inspirational life and work of the painter and printmaker Gillian Ayres after her death.