He's a great - he's a great professor. He retired recently, but.But Peter Halley as well.

Unlike the background in many of the paintings that I was inspired by or paintings that I borrowed poses from - the great European paintings of the past - the background in my work does not play a passive role.

This is - it's a sociological experiment in many ways. And so you're seeing the results of what happens when you put a lot of boys in a room looking at art history.

In the end I'm in love with it [Western European easel painting]. And that's where a lot of the influence from the work comes from.

All art is self-portraiture.

I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works.

There's nothing shocking inherently about that, given that so much of the way that artists are taught is by copying old master paintings.