Creativity is mistakes.
I just love dressing up in everything a man is supposed not to be, in all that vulnerability, sweetness, preciousness and impracticality.
To appreciate art you’ve got to work at it a bit.
Until we can insert a USB into our ear and download our thoughts, drawing remains the best way of getting visual information on to the page. I draw as a collagist, juxtaposing images and styles of mark-making from many sources. The world I draw is the interior landscape of my own personal obsessions and of cultures I have absorbed and adapted, from Latvian folk art to Japanese screens. I lasso thoughts with a pen. I draw a stave church or someone from Hello! magazine not because I want to replicate how they look, but because of the meaning they bring to the work.
Beauty and seriousness are perhaps the most shocking tactics left to artists these days.
Originality is for people with short memories
I think when we talk of craft we talk of a certain set of processes, whether that be clay of glass if jewelry or textiles, and we look back through history instantly.
Taste is a phenomenon. Most of taste is unconscious - it comes from your upbringing, from your family, from your society, your gender, your race; it's a melange of all those things.
Art is not some fun add-on to life.
Contemporary art often plays to the part of us that is very uncomfortable with not being sure, that cannot maintain a state of 'don't know'. The over-prioritising of meaning gets in the way of just experiencing the art in a more sensual way. Judging quality purely from an intuitive emotional response needs more confidence and experience than just working it out like a crossword clue.
It is true that there are not many smiling faces in modern art galleries. Happy art is much harder to make. Art and humour are uneasy bedfellows. Artists need strong feelings to motivate them to make things. I am often fuelled by anger.
The middle class male thinks he has a monopoly on objectivity.
I'm concerned with not ever being fashionable.
The basic premise of taste, as Stephen Bayley, the cultural critic, said, is that taste is that which does not alienate your peers. Most people want to fit in with their tribe in some way or another, so they give off signals, whether it's with their clothes, their behavior, their car, their whatever, and gain status. Every tribe has a hierarchy, and that's what taste is: it's an unconscious display of who you are, and where you want to be.
If you want to be successful in the art world you've got to look to the art world; you don't make it for the bloke next door and then hope the art world is going to look at it. That's one of the big mistakes people make.
I like the idea of my art being a covetable object; I like preciousness. A lot of art seems to flaunt its throw-away character... But you have to sail out into the dangerous sea of fine art with these crafted works.
Artists should imprint their handwriting on the work, because if they give a piece to a fabrication studio, the craftsmen there may actually be too perfect; you don't see the quirks that the artist would have developed.
I always say to people if you want to see what Britain looks like, watch Gogglebox. It's brilliant and funny and warm and clever.
A lot of people who work in computers think that the world is like them.
If you're in the culture business, you're not so locked in to your class, or you can have fun with it.
I think if people really want music they'll search it out.
Desmond Morris says that men make better artists because they are greater risk-takers; on the other hand, he thinks that women are better organisers and diplomats and more suited to become politicians.
