Special Individual Circumstances This chapter offers a clear, practical intervention in ongoing debates about the validity of painting in a digital age by suggesting that in order to survive, painting must keep in touch with its unique capacities and qualities. One of these is the sensory and semantic complexity and richness afforded by the two-foldness of the painted surface. This chapter is the outcome of a collaboration between a theorist (Heywood) and a practitioner (O'Brien) who made distinctive but equally significant contributions. It discusses the important question of the idea and the practical, creative challenges of the painted surface for all painting as an art. It defends and elaborates Richard Wollheim's view of the 'two-foldness' of the painted surface, that is, its capacity to present to the viewer the opportunity to see both the optical details of the material 'skin' of paint itself and something seen in or through the literal surface. Extending Wollheim's point, the paper argues that painting as an art exists between but not at either one or the other of these points. The chapter examines this view in relation to works by Bronzino, Titian, Pollock, Gillian Ayres, Jason Martin and others.' The argument of the chapter is a significant contribution to the on-going debate about the contemporary validity of painting and other traditional media as forms of artistic practice. RAE_import_type : Chapter in book RAE_uoa_type : LICA