As the artist commented, ‘Grey Surface’ was part of a series of paintings which “at this time endeavoured to make a dense or thin monochrome grey field active through the build up and handling of the paint surface. These paintings were made in a period when a marriage ended and my father died. Whether they succeed or not the paintings were intended as a metaphor for the ravages of the time. The painting was an act of building up layers of paint to hide, or protect, covering over what was there before, developing a protective skin through repetitive paint motions, in a camouflage grey, trying to find an order out of very little.”