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

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'm not one of those artists having people there lying around on their paintings, you know, like Hockney or whoever.

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.

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

I think if I was Trinidadian, I would latch more on to the myths and romanticise the place more. I don't think it's my place to do that - they're not really mine. I'm an outsider.

It's still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don't think I would do it otherwise.