I probably use more grays than any other artist in the history of art.
Art is transformative. It's not 2+2=4. It works like the sea. It changes geography through its constant and relentless movement, just the way plants and water shape the world.
I am a very spiritual person: I could say a Catholic with a strong underpinning of Zen.
My work is very serious, and I use a lot of black, too.
My art is based on impurity. You have to mix things from different refined cultures to get something raw, to make it go again.
I work on stretched linen canvas, sized so that the surface already has a sense of tension when I begin. It is a very rich and reactive surface. I begin by drawing on the canvas with a kind of loose line, very simply and freely. I paint very thinly, which allows me to change the drawing if I want to.
Painting is profoundly emotional. When I finish a painting, I'm usually extremely sad.
My father was a genius footballer, a natural, two-footed centre-forward who had played for Arsenal juniors, but he was sent out to work aged 14 and so lived out his life in a frustrated, rageful way.
I was always artistic - right from childhood - but my love of painting came a bit later. It followed my love of music.
I look at my paintings for a very long time before letting them out of my studio. I like to get on the treadmill and look around at all of my paintings while I exercise. I try to stare them down to make them reveal their weaknesses. If they reveal weaknesses, they get repainted.
My childhood was extremely unhappy. That's not to say that my parents didn't love me. But it was traumatic, and of course, art doesn't come out of rosy gardens. It comes out of damage.
When I was a young kid at art school, I loved the sensual geometry of Poliakoff, which, of course, is inherent in my own work.
If you stand over on the edge of the west coast of Ireland and look west, you are looking at something you can't see, only imagine. You know America is there, and you can imagine it being there. But you're also looking into infinity, because you can see nothing.
I'm quite a social person, quite a communicator, and I like to have the work of other people around.
I think that I make chords when I paint, so I think you would be listening to the cello. It's deep, and it's resonant. A lot of people have compared me to Brahms - that slightly melancholic sensuality that's highly structured. Well, that describes my work right there.
As a child, the most important people in my life were my pet rabbit and Mary, mother of Jesus.
When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.
After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved - or I proved - that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis.
Imagine a world without art: it's George Orwell's nightmare!
My job is to return abstraction to the people: in a sense, to popularize it without lowering the bar, which is a lot easier said than done.
