A few years ago, we got asked to judge the 2023 John Moores Painting Prize and I leapt out of my sickbed to reply a quick yes because — fuck, it was like being picked up by a wind that has been getting stronger over the ocean for a century. The longest-running painting prize in the UK, it comes with a biennial exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery here in Liverpool and I’ve been so many times that it’s part of my brain, not just my calendar.

Like, if I ever had art last period, my sixth form teacher used to send me on the bus into town because she knew the best way to teach someone about art is to sit them down in front of it. And I would sit. I would look. My eyes wobbled in their sockets when I tried to focus on that op-art hamster cage by Dan Hays. I would watch the water ripple out from under a kid standing on wet ice when Peter Doig coaxed open a portal. I would sit for ages, or until my Mum called to ask why I hadn’t come home.

But by the time I got myself back into my bed, my stomach had done that specific twisting thing it does when I’m on the verge of doing something I probably shouldn’t. Like Pinocchio’s nose running away from lies, this was guilt solidifying. I wasn’t sure prizes were good. Not morally good, not good in terms of the world I wanna live in. I had to say yes — I just hoped the experience of being a juror would make my position clearer even to myself.

I faced 3,300 anonymous paintings on a computer screen. Yes, no, no, no, yes, no. If any one member of the jury was interested, a painting moved on to stage two. We met in London for a few days to decide which of the slightly smaller 1,800 paintings we wanted to see in person. We had to decide that part together, but pushing our subjectivities together was like cocktail-shaking water with oil. It was debate club. It was a party and a fencing match.

The last stage took place back home where we met finally 300 paintings in the flesh. We’d spoken so much about these objects, it was like meeting Internet friends in person with all the ‘wow, you’re so much taller than I thought you’d be.’ The Walker had space for 70 paintings in the exhibition, but there was only money for one winner. Staff brought paintings in one by one for judgement and we sat there not jurors but barristers, making a defence for our client. To this day, a job has never made me so tired.

I learnt that a painting can be an entire essay in a frame. A painting can be so much an image that it’s hard to see what paint’s got to do with it; or so much about the paint its made of, it’s hard to not see humans as the animals we really are. I learnt painting can wink, slap, tell inside jokes, or ask you to acknowledge it right now this instant. It can have presence like the hot person at a party. It can be opaque. Your favourite stranger. Some paintings are pure craft. Some are still bleeding. Or they can be so low volume it’s like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, and then turning to find there’s nothing even there.

I was knackered but I was also art’s biggest fan. Like I understood it or something. So high I could see the curve of the horizon. I really wanted to choose the paintings I couldn’t find the words for. The weirdest shit. Scrappy, alien. I wanted to show the world the paintings that appeared to advance the medium in one way or another, so that it only made sense in this show, not one twenty years ago. I had to hunt for art that would keep that wind ticking across the planet forever.

I’d said on day one that we should just divvy it up and choose a few paintings each because it seemed like the only way we’d ever manage to whittle it down to 70. Later, when we came to some conclusions but mostly couldn’t, we went back to that plan and each made our own lists until finally the job was done.

I was left with the realisation that if I had been swapped out for someone else — my next door neighbour, the critic to my left, someone who likes oranges where I like apples — one sixth of that year’s exhibition would have shifted. Judging was never about finding the very best paintings in the submission pool. It could only ever have been about finding the paintings we wanted. We, whoever we were. Because the best doesn’t exist in art. Any exhibition or winner of John Moores, the Turner Prize, Max Mara, whatever it is — any prizewinner is simply a coincidence that depends on whoever was on the jury that year, which depends on whoever was tasked with picking those jurors, and so on.

My clarity there is what I was thinking about walking around the 2025 John Moores Painting Prize this week. As a visitor I know now I’m not here to measure how good anything is, I’m just measuring my own taste against that of the jury. I felt a big distance between us this time around. Felt it in this year’s winning painting by Ally Fallon, which didn’t do anything new. Didn’t have presence. Didn’t make me wanna look at it for so long I’d have to ask an invigilator for a chair. Didn’t blow any new winds. There was also a Simon Williams painting across a light box that I couldn’t get on board with because I did the same thing for my foundation; and an acrylic painting by Annie Frost Nicholson that was too Groovy Chick for my liking, and listen, I dress like a fucking clown.

I did enjoy Brian Bishop’s fake polaroid for all the tactile white dots along the bottom that were practically invisible but still there, and so charming for being there. I liked a hazy summer painting by Samantha Fellows because I have a thing for oil on aluminium. Made me think if I slipped and touched it, the whole image would wipe right off like sweat. Heeyoung Noh’s painting of a mother and daughter at a bathhouse did have presence. A vast memento mori with water droplets studding naked bodies like tiny crying jewels. Selma Makela’s water fountain was sketchy and loud and I wished all the rooms were full of paintings like that. I dunno what was going on with me that day but basically everything I did like was wet.

I left and walked through town and thought, uh, the weird, logical truth here is: I’ll never enjoy future instalments of John Moores exhibitions as much as I did in 2023 when I got to cater a slice to my exact taste. I have killed it for myself. I like that I can still discover new feelings.

But on killing things, it’s a bit like that E.B. White take on comedy, ‘explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.’ I am so glad I killed the competition for myself. Its image and its power are dead. I know for every person selected, granted, and funded in the arts, there’s many more made to feel they aren’t worthy. But I don’t believe the jury has the right to decide if I feel worthy or not, when this is more about them than it is about the thing they’re judging. The jury doesn’t have the right, neither does the critic, nor the audience. I have been all three, and the person applying. I am so calm here on the other side. Calm or dead.

When I got home and sat down to write this, I kept thinking of all the paintings that weren’t picked. The ones I would have caught. The ones you’d bagsy if you were on the jury. The love that got away, the life, the energy there. I imagined the Walker parking their permanent collection and saying yes to all three thousand submissions, spilling into the library to left and the old courthouse on the right. I imagined visitors taking their time in front of each painting, or not, and shaking their head so hard it shook their whole body, and still searching, and hoping, and hating, and waiting until they found that one painting they wanted to look at for so long family would wonder where the hell they’d gone.