I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.
All pictures are unnatural. All pictures are sad because they're about dead people. Paintings you don't think of in a special time or with a specific event. With photos I always think I'm looking at something dead.
My early paintings weren't that good - I was very influenced by Francis Bacon. But there was a kind of intensity there. And however influenced they may have been by other people, even my earliest paintings were recognisably my own.
My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.
I always feel like the art's there and I just see it, so it's not really a lot of work.
I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.
When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.
I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.
I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.
Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.