It took me over a couple of months to find the right piece of transparent paper for a section near the centre, on the right side of the Garden of Nebuchadnezzar. When I did find it, it was on a bottle of my wife's toilet water.

Thomson's small oil sketches of the last years palpitate and throb. They are as direct in attack as a punch in the nose.

Any artist who doesn't think he's the best should quit.

With love I draw what I hate.

I don't believe anyone really likes paint, unless he's tempted to eat it.

Made up of corallitic accretions and painful increments, lit on rare occasions by bolts of revelation, and then stuffed behind the wainscotting to grope in the mouse-turd dust, art is the equivalent of athlete's foot, at best an exquisite itch, at worst an excuse to stop walking. On the emotional side, it is either masturbation with a hockey glove or a night beneath the sliding moon that shames Eros.

Painting is still to a great extent dominated by a central image; corners in most cases are like uninvited guests at a party, uneasy and unattended.