Ten years of my art was lost in a fire I accidentally started – but I made better work from the ashes

I put the finishing touches on my most ambitious body of paintings to date a few weeks before the first lockdown. There were hundreds of works of art in the studio. The Syrian writer Professor Ali Souleman and the documentary filmmaker Mark Jones worked with me for the past four years. In 1997 Ali lost his sight in a bomb blast in Syria and we were attempting to translate his experiences into a collection of paintings to make the unseen seen. The next day, Ali and Mark were going to unveil it. The studio was so large that there was no place for the eye to rest. It was a self-portrait of a restless mind.

I have always been driven by obsessive-compulsive tendencies. There was a patch of work that caught my eye. Is it a bit more dark and burnt? I felt a twitch behind my eyelid. I should have waited to move the boxes. I couldn't wait. I passed the blowtorch over the surface. It would take a moment. It took a moment.

A small flame flickered into life as the painting caught in an instant. As the fire began to spread across the wall, the calm attempts to stem it turned to panic. Set in. Efforts to douse the flames became desperate. The studio was thick with black smoke after the entire back wall caught fire.

I stumbled through the dark to the door. I screamed to the neighbours. Smoke reached deep inside my lungs. Waves of black smoke were visible from the double doors of the studio. My eyes were full of fire, I was breathless, crying, and my body was dripping with sweat. The studio was put out by the fire brigade in four hours. My work was destroyed after a decade.

In minutes the back wall was aflame, the studio thick with smoke

The next weeks were spent clearing up. When my wife was away, my mother and stepfather came to look after me and help me with the initial logistical tasks, such as buying a water pump, wellies and a torch. In real life and on social media, I received offers of help from family, friends, neighbours and strangers. I realized I had to do it alone.

The slow act of mourning was confronted by the scale of destruction. I ordered the burnt remains because it was a personal taxonomy and a museum of loss. Ash was gathered into bags. stretcher bars are arranged by size. The canvases were dragged out and organised. There is a slow documentation of what things might have been. A deep well of sadness was building, burned away by anger and resentment at my manic obsessiveness.

Ali and Mark went to see the studio after the fire. We worked our way through what remained, looking through touch and description as I guided Ali's hand across the surface of wooden stretchers stripped of canvas. We started to feel like we were unrecognized here. The entire studio, with its array of damage, shards of shattered glass and the skeleton substructures of paintings, was uncannily reminiscent of aerial views across a bombed out city.

The paintings were transformed into a recreation of the world Ali had fled a few years before. We achieved what we set out to do. The safe space between reality and painting was destroyed by the fire. Ali told me that he felt the same sensation of worlds colliding.

I decided to keep the burnt remains after we moved house. The remnants no longer read the same things. I saw their potential to hold new life. The melted paint pots could be covered in a substance that would transform them into sculptures. There were objects that could be photographed as research material for new work and materials that could be used in paintings.

Two years after the fire, the remains have become part of my work. I mixed ash into paint, mixed burnt stretcher bars and debris into sculptural paintings, and embedded various materials into canvases. The basis for the illustrations I did for the award-winning children's story Julia and the Shark was formed by them. I was making everything I could from the remnants of the fire. There is no violence or darkness in the new canvases. I've been trying to make paintings that speak to connection. The noise of previous work gave way to something quieter. To love.

The fire has made me change. It has made me think about painting and life in a different way. Instead of making a dozen large paintings in a month, I will fold a painted canvas and leave it in the garden for weeks, letting it build up layer by layer, removing paint with bleach, and adding foot and hand prints into the surface, encrusted and considered with deep attention. I paint abstract galaxies with floating limbs. There were constellations of colour floating over one another. It is a slow accumulation. I am approaching everything with care and calm. This has necessitated a rewiring of my brain, a concentration of the richness of the current moment, an antidote to relentless internal noise and anxiety. The obsessive-compulsive tendencies are not gone. A kind of harmony has been found with the chaos as my brain is still dialled into a manic Frequency. There is a desire to see better.

These new works are complex – I didn’t think I was this capable

After my studio burned, Ali and Mark came to see the new works. We were filming Ali and me working through the paintings. I directed Ali's hand across the surface, with his fingers pointing in a different direction. Touch with your eyes. It was a kind of meditation. It reminded me of the magic of painting, to slow time, to offer up an absolute concentration of the present, on the exchange between viewer and canvas. These new paintings are the best I have ever made, works of technical complexity and a tenderness I never thought I was capable of before.

The fire was caused by my brain's inability to stop thinking and action. I was guilty, bitter and self-hatred in the weeks and months after. It was my fault that the project was destroyed. The reality of mortality was present and felt fragile.

I now realize that it is more complex. The work was made in the first place because of that manic drive. All of my projects have been driven by it. It has allowed me to see that the burnt remains are not an end, but an endless set of possibilities. Showing Ali the new work, considering the slow mode in which all the works had been made and were being viewed, caused a shift. If the fire caused me to seek therapy and change the way I work, I am now reaping the rewards. Learning how to occupy the present moment has been the main joy. I'm better able to divert my energy into creativity if I notice and accept how my brain works. For a long time these quirks had felt like destructive traps, but now they feel like a gift.

Wreck: Gricault's Raft and the Art of Being Lost at Sea is available from guardianbookshop.com. There is an exhibition at No20Arts in London. Insight is a documentary by Mark Jones.