When I was young, I didn't want to do traditional painting and calligraphy. I deliberately wanted to separate from my father so I could feel I existed myself.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was brought up on art. My father thought I had a great hand at art and sent me to art school. But he did not want me to become a photographer.
I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.
When I was about seven, one or two people encouraged me, and art became an enormous and important refuge. By adolescence, I was absolutely passionate about it and felt those paintings and those painters, whether they lived a few hundred years ago or were still alive, were somehow my companions.
When I left the Royal College, I decided I would only make paintings that I would want to look at myself, that felt close to my life.
So much of my aesthetic was formed by my dad.
My parents always saw me as an artist, and that greatly influenced me.
I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be rewoven.
When I was growing up, I wanted to be a house painter like my father, but I was always screwing up when I went to work with him. I had a talent for knocking over paint and painting myself into corners. I also realized fairly quickly that painting bored me.
My dad was always such a frustrated artist. He always worked very hard to support his family, doing a bunch of ridiculous jobs. He wanted to be a painter, but then he also wrote science-fiction novels in his spare time.
My mother encouraged me to be artistic. It was written in a contract at an early age that I would be an artist.