There is a thing about beauty. Beauty is always associated with the male fantasy of what the female body is. I don’t think there is anything wrong with beauty. It’s just what women think is beautiful can be different. And there can be a beauty in individualism. If there is a wart or a scar, this can be beautiful, in a sense, when you paint it.
If there's a narrative, I want it in the flesh.
I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape.
I do hope I play out the contradictions that I feel, all the anxieties and dilemmas. If they're there in the work, then that's brilliant.
I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble.
The art I like concentrates on the body. I don't have a feel for Poussin, but for Courbet, Velásquez - artists who get to the flesh. Visceral artists - Bacon, Freud. And de Kooning, of course. He's really my man. He doesn't depict anything, yet it's more than representation, it's about the meaning of existence and pushing the medium of paint.
I like making work in my studio day in and day out, but I'm not so interested in the business side
Whether you think you like Rubens or not, his influence runs through the pathways of painting. Like Warhol, he changed the game of art.
