Painter Tom Campbell must be the king of chance encounters. While hungover at Frieze art fair the day after his 19th birthday, wearing paint-splattered jeans and lying on a bench, a 'big, gay, Italian guy' asked him if he was a painter and if he was any good. That guy turned out to be (Peruvian) Mario Testino, who bought four of Campbell's paintings before he had even graduated from Central St. Martin’s which, in Tom’s words 'changed everything'.

A year later, after watching a production of The Nutcracker, he mentioned his paintings of ballet dancers to a development officer from the English National Ballet on the lookout for collaborations and wound up getting complete access to their dancers and rehearsal space, eventually becoming ENB’s ‘painter-in-residence’.

But Campbell’s not just a modern-day Degas. 'I never want to paint a ballet dancer sitting there in a tutu or tying their shoes,' says Tom (or Tomo to his friends), 'I want to get the feeling of ballet, the essence, what Francis Bacon, [quoting the French poet Valéry] called the ‘sensation without the boredom of conveyance’.'

Luckily it only takes Campbell a second to come up with a slightly more accessible analogy. 'Have you seen The Lion King when Mustafa comes out the cloud to talk to Simba? There’s two seconds when he emerges where the drawing isn’t quite clear, he’s not quite fully there, and I always thought those parts before the concretisation of form were really interesting. And ballet was really good for that because dancers have all this movement before they reach the apex, their finite point.'

With broad brush strokes and overlapping shapes, some of Campbell’s more abstract works are hard to make out or as Yeats put it, tell ‘the dancer from the dance’. And he wouldn’t have it any other way. 'That’s what I love about painting, little particles that sometimes clump together and form an arm and sometimes they’re just floating about and being their own thing until something emerges. I try and paint so fast that you can’t really think about what you’re doing you just go for it and see what comes.'

'Sometimes it’s dreadful – yesterday I threw out eight paintings. But every single one is inherently a failure. If I could capture what I was trying to say or do in one painting I’d never need to do another one. Failure’s good and that’s another thing I like about watching ballet rehearsals, every time a dancer slips or is even a tiny bit off in a movement it makes you realise how perfect and flawless it was before. There’s definitely a link between ballet and what I think about painting.'

'As Beckett says,' he says ruefully, 'try again, fail again, fail better.”