Drawing on decades of conversations with practising artists, Martin Gayford offers intimate insight into the practice, meaning and potential of painting.

As a way of making images, pigment applied to any surface, from cave wall to canvas, painting has been around for tens of thousands of years. Yet it has proved capable of endless renewal. Now in the third decade of the 21st century it is once more at the forefront of contemporary art. How Painting Happens considers how and why this is so, examining this perennial medium through the eyes of its exponents past and present.

Martin Gayford draws on interviews carried out over more than two decades with, among many others, Frank Auerbach, Gillian Ayres, Georg Baselitz, Frank Bowling, Richard Estes, Lucian Freud, Katharina Fritsch, Rebecca Horn, Shirazeh Houshiary, Lee Ufan, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley, Jenny Saville, Frank Stella, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wayne Thiebaud, Luc Tuymans and Zeng Fanzhi. These diverse artists talk about how they work, the different routes by which they came to be painters, their contemporaries and predecessors. With painters' insight they discuss such previous exponents of the brush as Titian, El Greco, Edward Hopper, Suzanne Valadon, Petrus Christus, Van Gogh, Degas, Klee and Delacroix.

Altogether, this book presents a fresh, multidimensional perspective on the medium - so ancient and yet simultaneously so modern, and still capable of doing things no other art form can.