If you really want to experience the glory of paint, the thick swell it can cause in the heart, I’d recommend seeing a Frank Auerbach in the flesh. Failing that, acquiring one of his books. I consume art as some sweep the shelves of pharmacies for multivitamins. Throw it down my throat like a shot. While I can appreciate the intricacies of a charcoal sketch and the calming sensations of a watercolour, it is the slathered fat waves of oil and acrylic that are my drugs of choice.

I doodled constantly as a child and a teenager, almost compulsively. Every available surface was covered: the margins of newspapers, the backs of cereal packets, school books, even rulers. Every breath I took, out popped a ballpoint portrait of a guy with floppy hair, a woman with architectural cheekbones or an imagined plant with invented shapes for leaves. I no longer doodle because my hands have been commandeered by keyboards and trackpads.

But I do paint. That is when my hands remind me of their dexterity. The lure of paint has yet to dry. Time is suspended when smearing canvas. If one is fully focused, one is untouchable and could be living through almost any period of history. The world has evolved so much that this can be said of fewer and fewer activities. John Keats was not bombing couplets into his Notes app before he forgot them.

Reading, strolling, painting, kissing, crying, napping for entire afternoons: these are all heritage pursuits. What a thrill to know that I have wiped the paint from bristles with turps in the same manner, or almost, as Vermeer or Van Gogh. Suffered the same multicoloured nail beds for days. Thrown a cloth down in despair. Accidentally wiped navy blue across my forehead. Mixed a colour to match my mood. Nailed a shadow or an earlobe on the fifth attempt.

But the greatest joy of painting is the finish, similar to a marathon or that other popular climax. Transitioning from achieving to achievement. Standing back and thinking, the end – and being content. A dollop of equanimity; a stroke of satisfaction. The tap of wood on wood as the paintbrush returns to the easel. In the recent, beautiful French film Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, Héloïse asks of her painter lover, “When do we know it’s finished?”

“At one point,” Marianne replies, “we stop.” It’s in the instinctive knowing when to stop that gratification lies.