I love to see a wood full of bluebells. Growing up in the Kent countryside, I have special memories of this brief annual spectacle.
I want to paint something that's gorgeous, something that's perfect. So that it's full of sadness.
I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse.
One drawing demands to become a painting, so I start to work on that, and then the painting might demand something else. Then the painting might say, 'I want a companion, and the companion should be like this,' so I have to find that, either by drawing it myself or locating the image.
Now, I love painting. I love looking. I love the fact that they don't move. They constantly change with the light. They are sort of patient.
I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.
All art becomes history as soon as it is made, so it is inevitably part of a tradition. It doesn't matter a toss if it is in paint or in film; it is all art.
If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.
I'm probably not going to develop to a final state as an artist. Like, become better and better, more and more refined. Become 'pure.' I don't think that's going to happen to me, because I don't really see that as something I want to explore.
I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.
A painting should be tough; it should have muscle, but I have to find some tenderness in it, too. There has to be that dynamic.
My desire to be an artist really came out of being broke and unemployed and incapable of holding a job down. That's what it was driven by for sure.
I do think you get lonelier and lonelier being an artist as you get older.
I'm probably creative for half an hour a day. The rest of the time, I'm just doing what's necessary to make that creativity visible.
People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's.
I don't make political work. I don't make work that criticises the state. I make as human work as I can.
I don't vote. I voted Labour once, in that moment of euphoria. I know that if people only made a voice for change, then change will happen, but I'm not that person. I'm painting pictures.
The disenfranchised should be going to art school - not the franchised.
The surface is all you get of me.
I lived on nothing for years - squatted where I lived and where I worked, stole electricity, made things from stuff I found in skips, used paper that had been discarded - you do everything you can do to keep going and not have to get a job.
