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.

If you close the door to the things you feel comfortable with, you will never discover the truth about yourself.

In the studio, it took me a long time to work out how to make paintings that had the intensity that I was able to create by painting whole rooms. There is a very limited number of colours but there are many variations. I decided to use the purest palette that I could.

I look at the character of the exhibition and I treat it as I would a painting or an installation. When I did the Summer Exhibition at Royal Academy, I did it exactly as I would when making a new work.

All the basic information should be in the object itself.

When I told people that I was going to paint the big room magenta, many people thought that I was crazy.

In Britain the power of authority was weakened. There was much more individual freedom and there was great academic freedom.