Whom does he admire among contemporaries? “Difficult to say,” he offers diplomatically. Too few or too many? “Too few, I hate to say it. I am very open-minded but most biennales I find totally uninteresting.” Most of the works in Tate Britain’s show of contemporary painters this winter “looked like paintings made at a desk. I like the slacker moment, the slacker attitude, in Picasso, Matisse, even Monet, in people like René Daniëls, early John Currin – it means you don’t really care that much, not that the work is made with ease but there’s a lack of finish that is the living element in a painting. Sometimes paintings can be finished but also quite slack, like [Edward] Burra, he had a lot of attitude. Paintings can’t be closed down, they have to be alive.”
“I see painting as being physically unprecious, paintings are robust, resilient.” He works alone in his studio, and has no assistants: “If I had other people around to keep busy, that would be the worst possible thing, you would think of the work as being needed rather than having to be. As an artist, you don’t want to get into producing.” He has many canvases on the go. “Well, I’ll have a lot of paintings, I wouldn’t say I was working on them, it’s very frustrating, very slow.”
The top piece looks very like the Francis Bacon painting of Vincent Van Gogh. ‘Painter on the Road to Tarascon’, 1988.
Excerpt from FT 3-8-14