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I was on holiday recently and I came home to find that one of the papers here had 'bikini'd' me on the beach. I was wearing a grossly unflattering costume and they had published photographs of me taken from behind. I looked dreadful. I went into our local newsagent and bought up every copy.

I get into all sorts of trouble with my publicists and with newspapers because I won't do photographs.

In my 20s, when I was a photojournalist in Beijing. I joined an underground art group and put on clandestine exhibitions of my paintings.

I did some artistic nudes when I was I 8 with a French-Canadian photographer while I was modeling. They were beautiful shots, and they were not about nudity.

I was in Florida with Burt Stern, the photographer who shot Marilyn Monroe on the beach with a sweater, and we smoked a joint. The bathing suit kept coming off in the water, and I just ripped it off. I was very comfortable being naked.

Painting self-portraits without clothes on has also given me some publicity.

I had a natural feeling for sculpture, and the nudes are my sculpture.

My very first magazine cover was the National Enquirer.

It was a scandal when I did French 'Playboy' in 2008, though I was never actually nude in it. I think it's really funny that I'll have a cover of 'Playboy' to show my grandkids.

All the legal action I've taken against newspapers has had a massively positive effect on my life and achieved exactly what I wanted, which is privacy and non-harassment.