“I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain”

“I wanted to paint a picture some day that people would stand before and forget that it was made of paint. I wanted it to creep into them like a bar of music and mushroom there like a soft bullet.”

“I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.”

“It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.”

“I paint flowers so they will not die.”

“King of the Ruskin was my show last year, last May, in New College Long Room. I filled that old room with seven big paintings. Big, colourful paintings. King of the Ruskin included better work than Abstractionism. I’ve tried since to paint like that and I can’t. The King of the Ruskin paintings were it. I didn’t realise it at the time but they were the best paintings I would ever make. They were the paintings I wanted to see and they did everything I wanted painting to do at that time. So these are my last paintings. I will never paint again. But why didn’t I stop in the first place? No one ever knows when to stop. They just decline. For me, I had to kill my painting. With King of the Ruskin I had delivered the mortal wounds but one rarely has the pleasure of a quick and graceful exit. No, it has been slow, painful and distressing. Of course I am speaking in hindsight; I only realised it was the end with the randomly themed, scrappy, clustered paintings where it finally became apparent to me that I had no skills, no ideas, no interest, no pride and no pleasure in painting. I was like a dying cowboy, making a final, feeble bid at victory with random, aimless shots at an invisible enemy.”