Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.

Painting is sometimes like those recipes where you do all manner of elaborate things to a duck, and then end up putting it on one side and only using the skin.

I have a hatred of habit and routine. And what dogs love is just that. They like regular everything, and I don't have regular anything. I have a timetable, but no routine.

When I look at a body it gives me choice of what to put in a painting, what will suit me and what won't

I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.

My work is purely autobiographical... It is about myself and my surroundings.