I have been painting my flat for the last seven years.
Not because I've been procrastinating over which shade of magnolia to use, or agonising whether to make a feature wall a different colour. I don't even need to ask my landlord for permission.
I'm recreating a life-size version of my south London studio apartment in oil paint. One piece at a time. One square foot per day. A fragmented, glitchy jigsaw. Snapshots of moments. A diary of visual responses.
Each day I paint a square, and each day it is added to a larger whole.
If I had a pound for every time it's been compared with David Hockney's multi-photo 'joiners' series, I would be living in a much larger flat. But it's true they share the multi-aspect viewpoint where the whole thing doesn't quite line up; some bits are overlayed and repeated, maybe more like the way a fly sees the world than a human.
The inspiration was actually less Hockney, more Brian Eno. It began as a pragmatic approach to improving my painting skills back in 2018 when I was fairly new to oil paint. I heard Brian talking on the radio about ways of getting through creative block. He said: "What's better than having nothing? Having something."
Having something — anything — to work with is always better than a blank page staring back at you. Even one mark on that page gives something to start from. Something to work from, to change, to judge, to question, to manipulate and move forward. It's the first stepping stone.
Brian used the word 'accretion' which I'd never heard before. The accumulation of matter, the growth of something incrementally, one thing attracting another. Small pieces adding up to create a larger whole. A mass that grows, generates its own momentum, energy, gravity. The sum being greater, more powerful than its constituent parts.
And that's what I was doing at that very moment: I was painting a fragmented plant on some small scraps of different size canvas. Accretion in action. Synchronicity.
I had restarted painting after a hiatus of more than 10 years since my art foundation and I was back in exploration mode. I wondered what would happen if rather than painting the one picture over a number of sittings, I created one picture in a number of fragments. It might be a more honest way of expressing the differences in each sitting.
In terms of reflecting the different moods, light conditions, applications day to day then coming back and adding all of those emotions, conditions into one homogenised, diluted soup of emotions, this surely offered clarity. Albeit fragmented, disjointed. But isn't that what it's actually like in the here and now?
I use a square viewfinder — the same size as the canvas to target the area I am going to paint. Painting in sections is about painting in snapshots. Little snippets of moods, feelings, approaches. It might be playfulness one day, resistance and resentment the next. It's a diary of life, my journal of living in this little homely studio in London over a period of years, and will probably end up being more than a decade's work.
After the plant study I wanted to formalise and expand the process and decided to see what would happen if I disciplined myself to painting my Persian rug in 35 square foot pieces.
I thought about the project in terms of tackling the barriers to working, producing, the number one being: finding a subject (inspiration). If I paint what's in front of me, that is out of the equation. Secondly, finding the time: if I paint every day that is also nullified. And then with that stripped away all that is left is being present with the paint. No outside noise.
Inspiration as a luxury, a bourgeois choice which takes art from the realms of production to decorative frivolity.
I wondered whether people felt inspired to go to work every day, and if not, why then did they go? I went. Not very far from my bed, granted, but I went. The original 'work from home'. Lockdown before lockdown was a thing.
I have painted more than 300 pieces of my flat, and if I had waited for inspiration I probably would have only produced 50 pictures. A quotidian ritual, a daily exercise in acceptance and growth. Some days I want to do it, other days I don't. But I do it anyway. And I tend to like the results best from the days where I don't want to do it.
After doing this for a number of days I discovered another creative motivator: boredom. The repetition forced me to think about mixing it up for my own sanity's sake, and I began to experiment with braver colour palettes, more efficient ways of replicating the pattern.
It also got me questioning how I dealt with changes in the environment: Do I move the laptop cable from where it lies one day, to match with where it was yesterday when it fell across the previous painting? I decided it was much more interesting (and honest) to leave it where ever it fell. This became another breakthrough in defining the direction of the project.
From there I felt a momentum and growing confidence, and tackled the sofa next. The viewfinder became a window through which the contents changed with a move of the head, and I was forced to make decisions on what went in, what didn't. Then there were people on my sofa: the arm of a postman pal here, a torso of an artist friend there. The glitches, the joins and the non joins became more stark.
That was 2018, when I eventually did 190 consecutive days from February to September of that year. And then I stopped. I had represented and replicated my rug, the sofa, a bookcase, a skylight and even the Velux window. And I went on to display it in a disused shop in Surrey Quays shopping centre which is now my full time studio. Everything opened up for me from that point onwards. You never know where one idea will take you so it's good to follow the idea.
I called the exhibition Machines for Living In, after Le Corbusier’s utilitarian vision for urban planning because that's how I felt, and still do. A pragmatic approach to art, to life, to living in London. Slotted into this larger tapestry of energy, of people, of flats in this block I live. Distilled into this unconscious dance, unique but united, disparate but tight, all part of this mad, confusing but beautiful universal consciousness.
I restarted the project in February 2025. That was 109 days ago and I've painted every day since. I came back from holiday and realised my flat was a tip. I had planned to get rid of my painting gear from my living space, make it less studio (70% at present), more flat (30%). But then my girlfriend made a throwaway comment about how good the knife magnet in the kitchen would look as a painting, and the next thing I knew I was back in it and painting the back of my door and a pedal bin.
Of all my favourite squares though, it's the one of the kettle boiling. The pan bubbling away is a close second.
I'm less militant about it these days. More relaxed. It has evolved into a more playful existence where I am more at peace with expressing who I am in my work rather than the so-called 'honesty' of my living space. More like a self portrait now, documenting my nerdy pastimes (snooker on the TV, pizza dough on the sideboard).
It's garnered much more interest this time. It went massive on TikTok, and latterly Instagram. Nearly a million views on one of the more mundane videos. It seems like the more everyday it is, the more people connect with it. I'm baffled by the interest people have in watching some bloke they don't know paint the corner of a radiator.
It should keep me busy for the next year or so at least. I plan to paint every last piece of the flat. Maybe another 500 pieces.
And to celebrate its completion, I'm going to move out.
Check out Rod Kitson's website, and follow him on Instagram as @rodkitsonart and TikTok as @rodkitsonart. Rod is selling squares from his original 2018 artwork, at £450 per square. Contact him for more info.
All images © Rod Kitson
