Usually when I go to the Summer Exhibition, I think every room is too much the same, and I loose my capacity to look at individual works.

In a sense [Joseph] Albers was an authoritarian teacher. He had rules about most things and very definite ideas.

I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.

When I look at the objects that I draw, it seems to me so obvious about the contemporary world - these are our world.

I think that the exchange is very important. Before I did the exhibition in Shanghai, I was a judge for the John Moores Painting Prize and that was very interesting for me, because some of the judges are Chinese and some are British, and we look at the work together. It was fascinating that most of the time we were in complete agreement, but some of the time we were not. People send their works from all over China. For a foreigner, this gave me a very good picture about what is happening in China and its art today.

In the period of '60s to the '90s, British art schools were small, and the number of student was small. The personal contact was great.

The first exhibition that I used bright colours in painting the room was at a gallery in Paris, and there were seven rooms in the gallery. It was very nice gallery, not very big rooms, around the courtyard, it was a very French space. So I painted each room in different colour. When people came to the exhibition, I saw they came with a smile. Everybody smiles - this is something I never saw in my work before.