As an artist, you are aware there is this strange money market out there, but you have no sense of how it works.

If you are someone like Jeff Koons, and you have to work out how to make a big chrome heart or something, then there are lots of people and a big production involved. The money is more natural somehow. For me, I am just on my own in the studio, trying to make things work. One thing is sure: it doesn't make painting any easier.

I also learned that you are affected by your environment, even if you try not to be. Color, light that is, matters because you want to do justice to it and also you get excited by it.

You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

I love Trinidad and I love living there, but it's quite harsh.

There could be a hundred paintings in every one painting, depending on when you stop.

Painting becomes interesting when it becomes timeless.