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Picture books are being marginalised. I get the feeling children are being pushed away from picture books earlier and earlier and being told to look at 'proper' books, which means books without pictures.

I'm interested in illustration in all its forms. Not only in books for children but in posters, prints and performance as a way of drawing people into books and stories.

I didn't have picture books - there weren't many around when I was a child.

The earliest paintings I loved were always the most non-referential paintings you can imagine, by painters such as Mondrian. I was thrilled by them because they didn't refer to anything else. They stood alone, and they were just charged magic objects that did not get their strength from being connected to anything else.

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

I've been taking art lessons since I was little, and I've always drawn. I think in pictures.

I don't very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.

I see things like they've never been seen before. Art is an accurate statement of the time in which it is made.

The value of writing about art is its effect on the imagination. Paintings allow us to inhabit another culture, place, and time period, and address the issues of those time periods that resonate with our own time.