Twelve artists reflect on their relationships with the source material for their work, in a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary pictorial practice. This collection of new works and writings explores the processes of composition and mediation, entering the terrains of image and picture, and throwing fresh light on the interplay and differences between them. It seeks understanding of the distinction between captured appearance, which might be very immediate and momentary: an image, and something that is constructed, involving another duration entirely: a picture.

Within the context of historical and current debates around the evolving form of the picture, from Charles Baudelaire’s 19th Century notion of ‘painting as world’, to Jean-François Chevrier’s recent discussions of composition and tableau, we discover the ways in which artists’ strategies of making become individualized forms of mediation; we see how artists utilise the materiality of painting and drawing to re-work or re-see their initial visual sources; and we follow how the complex relationship between picture surface and the space of the viewer is negotiated as the arena for shared perception and meanings.