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Our ideas for prizes were pretty unanimous. We admired the qualities of colour and placement and visual wit in Peter Davies' painting; the colour, bravery, determination and weirdness in Alan Gouk's; and the heavy sputtering physicality in BANK's. With Paul Morrison it was the twisting of what might seem to be mere graphic facility into something major. And with Martin Maloney it was directness and painterliness – actually achieved by collage rather than by paint – and the way he made childlike innocence have an unexpected feeling of anger about it.

One work that didn't get a prize – but would have if there were more to go round – is called How We Won The War On Socialism. These words are presented in the painting almost as forms. Are they forms? Maybe they hover slightly above the forms. The real forms are actually rather formless, blobs and drips and so on. Anyone who’s been to art school will know that Abstract Expressionist blobs and drips are supposed to be connected to some kind of CIA plot in the 1950s to promote US values and knock out the Soviet Union. They will get the joke of this painting, or at least these words: they will see them as part of an argument about the 'aesthetic' versus something else.

As jurors on the John Moores we never mentioned the word 'aesthetic' in our conversations. The popular audience for art that has grown up in the last ten years never hears much discussion about aesthetics. At least, the word itself isn’t used and the terms that used to be used by the art world when aesthetic arguments went on have been dropped. Now it's much more a kind of specialness of art and in particular a specialness of artists' lives that is discussed. Everyone probably suspects that Tracey Emin's life is no different to anyone else's. But it’s part of the new mythology that the uniqueness of her personality should be the issue, not the visual interest of the objects she makes. This all has something to do with the new popularity of art and what the new huge audience thinks art actually is.

We hope that starting this year, artists will see things differently. De Kooning once said that at a certain moment it seemed very radical to paint flesh blue. But that moment doesn’t last forever. Flesh-coloured could be just as radical, he said. Something like this applies today. Why not try thinking the unthinkable about what is, after all, pretty normal: the fact is paintings have to hold together. They have rules. The John Moores this year is a show that admits these rules and is happy to take them seriously.

There’s not really an opposition of 'the aesthetic' versus 'the popular'. If you’re a painter the thing you’re doing is strived at until it's satisfactory. Cartoons and squiggles might do the job, as much as something more conventionally painterly such as thicks and thins and considerations of surface, and spread, and edges, and so on. An artist might have an aesthetic of filled-up-ness. He or she might think, 'Oh it’s too bare – not enough jokes!' That is, an aesthetic is created by the terms of the object that you’re working on.

It took three days to look at the slides and then two days at Walker Art Gallery to make the final edit and hang the show. Initially we were surprised by how much we agreed with each other. We thought about it and decided we were all looking for some kind of 'visual dynamics'. Then we thought, 'Yes, we're looking for something that's visually compelling!'

We seemed to like things that had a strong relationship to abstraction, whether or not they were figurative. We tended to reject work that wasn’t particularly about painting even if it was perfectly OK in other ways. We rejected it if it wasn't somehow about painting itself, as a kind of subject matter. Maybe the work could have been done in some other medium; it didn’t have to be a painting. 'That’s it!' we thought: 'These paintings we’ve picked could only be paintings!' (This begs the question of a couple of artists in the show whose works don’t have either paints or brushes involved, but we felt these were really paintings by other means.) We wanted to take the whole brief utterly seriously. This is a painting competition, after all. We began to feel we were making a statement about painting.

In the end, it was an issue of painting and meaning. What is the role of meaning? Is it really 'meaning' anyway? Haven't we all recently become used to an idea of meaning in art that is merely a list of significant concerns we're taught to tick off? They include the death of the author; the way nothing is essential and everything is constructed; death (of people, not just, er, authors); politics; identity, gender, abortions and cancer, and so on. Surely the physical manipulation of materials is meaningful in itself. Or is this too explosive an idea because of the legacy of modernism?

At an early stage of relative confidence in our unity of purpose we thought the show was going to be like a laboratory, a voyage of discovery and a war, all at once. It was going to be an experiment with certain materials. These were the current status of painting, our own tastes, the works submitted and the whole competition problem. We had to have control over the situation for something to be really happening, but not so much that we over-determined the results and made it pointless to have set up the experiment in the first place. We were going to make discoveries! It was going to be like a new land - but we couldn't expect all the boats to be carrying good types, filled with the faith (to use the old imagery and language of empire). There'd be weirdos in there, misfits, weaklings, chaps singing their own little songs, not necessarily the national anthem all the time. But it was a new land and a fresh beginning. As for the war, it was one of painting against non-painting. I don't know if we really thought through the discovery metaphor. It was probably that the Old World was full of tired notions of relativism and deconstruction that had become mental prisons. And we were voyaging with a cargo of drips and blobs to a New World of freedom.

We thought there's nothing new under the sun, but in painting there always is. You’ve seen this category, or style, or you know this intellectual framework – but you haven't seen quite this relationship of elements. For this experiment we accepted not everything would be Beethoven. Different registers would be allowed – not just stylistic difference but different registers of intensity that might range from apparent slightness to inescapable physical impact.

Once in Liverpool the fights soon started. Rather than the Promised Land it was a land like any other, full of discord and thunderclouds as well as nature shoes and lovely sunshine. It turned out we all had different ideas about impact. Terror of appearing unfashionable of course afflicts anyone with any sense, but we all had different ways of combating this problem. Maybe we didn't even realise that it was the problem a lot of the time. In any case in the worst moments of tension - and it's a show of tensions as much as anything else - perhaps it was this particular factor that resulted in us sometimes not believing the others had quite remembered the good idea about the painting experiment. And the great adventure and the faithful, and so on.

In the end if the show isn't nirvana we felt that at least the experiment and the war had happened. Everything in the show had some kind of painting intelligence: these artists knew what they were doing, we felt. Some of them rehabilitated the old radical abstract art (which is no longer radical, forty or fifty years after the event) giving it a bit of modernity. Some actually were oldsters and just kept up whatever it was they were doing in the first place. Many were too young to have known anything different anyway, but their work somehow richly reflected the shifting sands of past moments, in a way that perhaps the young authors of these works didn’t even see themselves; but even so the intelligence idea still applied. Everything in the show in the end was not just an intellectualism or a knowingness or an irony, but was positively visually intelligent. And we liked it.

Matthew Collings