I like strong/vulnerable interesting women, and then sometimes I like painting beautiful men, like Kurt Cobain, or Mr Darcy.

A common misperception of me is that I am a victim. I am not a victim. I am just honest about how things affect me.

Books are my one luxury. I have a lot of large coffee-table-size art books, in the shelves above my bed, about people like Warhol, Basquiat and Velasquez.

On Christmas Day I'll head off for a couple of laps around the Serpentine, or a trek around the whole of Hyde Park. Or I'll walk right across town, with Curtis, my son Jamie's bull mastiff.

I'm looking forward to being old, to be able to accept what I am and become self-sufficient. Mid-forties is a good age and it's not too far away.

I've lived on my own since I was 13 and not been to school and brought a son up who's now 18 and run theatre companies and bought a butcher's shop, learnt guitar by myself, taught myself to sing and that sort of stuff.

I will look through 200 photographs of Kate Moss and there will be just one that I connect with for some reason, maybe because of the composition or something in the eye... Something touches me and I know I have to paint it, in the way a child knows it wants something.