Having trained as a theatre designer as long ago as the 1970s in London, my experience of this discipline still impacts on the work I make today. An important remnant is my fondness for making series of paper works to accompany the ‘main’ work. They are not made as sketches, nor do they stand alone, but instead they accompany and contextualise. The first set of Toussaint paper works were made to go with a series of Haitian cut-outs, which never developed beyond one I made of Toussaint himself. In the late 1980s – around 1988 – I was asked whether I considered myself to be a history painter. On the spur of the moment I replied that I was, and spent the next few decades trying to be one. My aim was to paint events that no one else had tackled and to spread information in galleries and museums, arts centres and community venues about individual people who had contributed to political or cultural change in the past, but remained practically invisible in contemporary times. The series Scenes from the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1987) consists of 15 works on paper, each with two paintings relating to the same event; a sort of close-up and long shot (Figure 113). The work attempted to illustrate the texts I had avidly read in both The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James and This Gilded African by Wendy Parkinson. I wanted children to know about this extraordinary episode in the politics of the black diaspora and painted in a way that I hoped would appeal to publishers. In a way, the work resembled a graphic novel with minimal text and was to be read in a linear way. The paintings were done in soft and gently colourful watercolour, sending out friendly and accessible information about ordinary days in the life of an exceptional man. I tried to include details about his family and his preoccupations outside those of the slave rebellion. It was a romantic view perhaps, and did not really touch on the complexities within the ranks and hierarchies of the revolutionaries themselves. Paintings included scenes of friendship with other revolutionaries, his love of and expertise with horses, the food he ate, his knowledge of the efficacy of local herbs, the influence of his wife, the dedication of his sons and the last days of his life in a French prison.