"I have a kind of healthy cynicism about what it is to look at the world, to be in a modern world surrounded by images."
"I like my paintings to have one foot in the grave, to be not quite of this world. For me they exist in a dream world, a world that is made up of all the accumulated images stored in our subconscious that coagulate and mutate when we sleep."
"Artists have to make up their own stories: it's another layer of the job an artist has to do in the 21st century, and it's a very difficult thing to do."
"...the whole thing of should I paint or not, is painting dead - of course it's not. Nothing has yet come about that can compare with it as a translation of that human desire to make marks, to make two-dimensional images of things or two-dimensional surfaces with colour and shape."
"I love Photoshop and all of the possibilities of manipulation that it gives you to play with. But the final product from the computer is always very lackluster. Not that I could do without it."
"I get a real kick out of painting. There are not many other things that can give you that long term satisfaction, that 'my life is worth something' sort of feeling."
"At the end of the day I always feel that I'm short of what I wanted to achieve. The paintings are a struggle to try to get to work. To some extent they often fall slightly short of my aspirations. That's what keeps you going. You start on the next one because you always feel that you might get closer to this goal of the ideal painting."
"In every show I include two or three paintings that are very figurative, more kitsch, and I suppose more direct or recognisable. They are there almost to counteract the abstraction in the other work."
"I do lots of drawings and them computer manipulation to stretch and pull things around. When I actually start painting them on the canvas I play around."
"I love the notion of appropriation, and the fact that we can't escape appropriation. All of the art we've ever seen in with us when we paint, or when I paint. Whether I choose to or not, I may appropriate artists' styles and marks and colour combinations."
"Fleshy is a good word to use because these paintings are very much about the discrepancy between the brush mark and the flesh, and often the relationship between living and dead flesh as well."
"A lot of the colours are quite repellent, and the rather tormented, irritating surface has a degree of unpleasantness about it. I suppose that's my gothic, adolescent self still there, peering through Foss and Dali! Even when I paint flowers, they always come out rather unpleasant and smelly looking."
"Art is theater and theater isn't real life - it's an exaggeration of real life; it's what makes people engage with something. You don't go to the opera because you want to see a supermarket; you go because you want to see grand themes played out, at a grand emotional level, heightened emotions, and that operatic sense is what I want in the work."
"I never want to lose that notion of appropriation - people say to me, sooner or later you'll stop copying other artists and you'll make work of your own, but it's never been my point to try to do that, because I never thought you ever could. The work is always going to be based on something, and I wanted to make the relationship with art history as obvious as possible."
"The titles are often trying to be embarrassingly direct, and vulgar in their directness."
