Wake up, shake off the night, go to the loo, have a coffee and take a bath. Dress, then cycle to the studio, via that sandwich shop you always use. Fiddle with the padlock and walk into the studio. Put on that old misshapen jumper, the one with the paint stains. It is cold here.
The day's ritual goes on, till you find yourself caught up in the optimistic tempo of late morning, looking at what you accomplished yesterday. Time to get going. You stand, you sit, you get up again and pick up a brush. There goes the phone. Put on some music, then finally lose yourself in painting. Hours pass.
At the end of the day you clean the slab you mix your paints on, throw the brushes in the turps and wash up. Then, buttoned up in your coat, you take a last look at what you did in the fading light. This is an abbreviated description of A Day in the Studio, a new painting by Lisa Milroy. The images are laid out like a strip cartoon, the cells presented as though they were a grid of drawings on sheets of paper, re-presented on the big canvas. Her day is so familiar to me, especially that one last look in the darkening room.
What was she painting that day? We never quite get to see. Maybe one of those paintings of rows of shoes, or piles of neatly folded shirts, or shiny black gramophone records or sailors' caps that made her career in the 1980s. As much as they were still lifes of objects, those paintings were also stealthy comments on consumerism and fetishisation, about the way we devour images and paintings as well as an endless variety of things - frocks, shoes, hats, light bulbs, door handles. Things we need and things we don't.
As the images in her paintings multiplied, so Milroy presented us with insatiable wants. Car tyres slanted away in a vast painted emptiness, obeying laws of capitalist overproduction as much as of perspective. Milroy rummaged in collectors' cabinets for exotic butterflies, rare stamps, Roman coins, pot shards and decorated Greek vases, Japanese mugs and bowls with their heavily pitted glazes, stacks of willow-pattern and dishwasher-safe plates. The things she painted provided her with a painter's problems and opportunities - how to render a slick of light reflected on a Grecian urn, the grooves on an LP, how to paint not just the pot or the plate, but the decoration on its surface, the zebra and its stripes.
How far to go into texture, sheen, the details and the decoration. She went on to paint singular images: a profile of a girl with perfect skin and well-brushed hair and kids in skiing gear. Paintings that look like job-lot canvases for hotel bedrooms, and paintings of the hotel rooms themselves. Pictures of Japanese rooms and streets and London's windswept corners - Embankment tube station and a Soho newsagent's where I go to buy Spanish papers, the New York Review of Books, my favourite angling magazines. Milroy prompts you to list things: places, painting styles and idioms.
She detoured at one point into what we might see as abstraction - but were these patterned paintings, or paintings of patterns, wallpapers and wrapping papers? Her early painterly shorthand took a lot from Manet and Sargent. Later it shifted to a kind of anonymous suppressed descriptiveness reminiscent of Hopper. Her paintings of Japanese ceramics were photorealist, while her paintings of fast food gleamed with cholesterol and the backlit fakery of the burger joint menu.
She has always been interested in how things and their descriptions collide, how painting works, how perilous is its autonomy. The artist herself hung Tate Liverpool's excellent survey of her work, juxtaposing newer works with old, style against style, subject against subject. Her newest works - almost alarming at first sight - are painted in a style reminiscent of the drawings of Posy Simmonds (who is giving a talk at the Tate on Milroy's work). It seems that Milroy has had to re-jig her practice once again in order to focus on the social and on the autobiographical rather than on the surfaces of things (though even her earlier work was in part about the things she liked, her shopping habits, the places she has been and the art she looked at).
It has enabled her to be funnier, faster, maybe less self-censoring about what she can put in a painting. Yet the demands of execution - how to paint a crowd, a woman trying lipstick in a shop, how to do jars of cosmetics, speech bubbles and lettering, a shorthand for a thought or feeling - demand just as much rigour, inventiveness, graphic abbreviation as any still life object. She is putting into painting what artists usually leave to their notebooks or their prints (think of the difference between Turner's landscapes and his erotic drawings, Goya's court portraits and his Caprichos).
Milroy still has an omnivorous eye, for art as much as for the world of things and places, but she's turning it towards what she used to leave out. If she's painting differently now, and moving away from the manners of what might pass for a latter-day high style, then it is to let more of the world in, to deliberate on different feelings, things more essential and closer to home.
