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.

There was a point in time where the thought of people even talking about me made me anxious. Physically.

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.

When I was painting in art school - and I think many painters in the 1980s worked similarly - a finished painting would often be constructed from lots of other paintings underneath. Some of these individual layers of painting were better than others, but that was something that you would often only realise retrospectively.

The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

I'm aware that success can overwhelm you. The perception of you can be elevated to such a status that it's not you any more.

Often I think changes within my work have been seen as sudden changes or sharp changes, but for me they're not that sudden. They have been there in the studio, but not so much in public.