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painting is in some way autobiographical?’ I venture, rather primly.
    â€˜Autobiographical? Well yes, inevitably, it’s about my life, at some level. It’s filled with my thoughts about things. And yet when I’m in the middle of it, I forget about everything, aboutmyself and about friends and things that have happened. That might sound as if I’m talking about inspiration, but it’s not that. I mean, most of the time I simply don’t know what I’m doing. I just get the bits of paint down and hope they suggest a way I can make something that looks as if it’s come directly off the nervous system. And if it comes at all, it usually comes very quickly and by a kind of accident. I might be working and thinking “Oh my God, this is awful” and put the brush right through the image I’ve been trying to make and, every now and then, just by chance, with the fluidity of oil paint, that gesture will suggest the image I’ve been looking for all along.
    â€˜But there’s no complete explanation as to how these images come up. Otherwise I suppose one wouldn’t bother to try and do them. In my case, I spend a great deal of time looking at things that have no direct relevance to what I want to do or anything and then one of them might crop up, just like that. I think one makes this kind of huge well inside oneself and images keep rising out of it the whole time. But you can’t analyse how, because it’s not really conscious. That’s why I say, half the time I don’t know what my painting’s about. I was doing a picture once and looking at a photograph of birds diving into the sea, and for some reason this curious double image came up. I couldn’t really tell you what it is, I mean I think of it as two people moving and it reminds me of certain Greek things too. But I couldn’t explain it.
    â€˜D’you know I think one thing about artists – there are very few real artists, of course – is that they remain much more constant to their childhood sensations. Other people often change completely, but artists tend to stay much the way they’ve always been. In my case, I’ve always been obsessed by images. Well, all sorts of things. When I was very young, for instance, I had this obsession with filters, I don’t know why, industrial filters and things. And I couldn’t stop looking at them. I’ve never found out why, it was really rather mad. Though I suppose if you really think about it the body itself is a kind of filter, filtering everything through the whole time.
    â€˜Of course I never expected to make a living by painting images, they were simply something that haunted me and that I knew I wanted to do. In that sense, I’ve been very fortunate. It probably won’t last, the way everything’s going. My things probably won’t sell any more. But then if I’m absolutely poor tomorrow, what difference will it make? If I have nothing, well, there it is, I have nothing. It won’t change my life. I’ll go back to being a manservant – because I was someone’s manservant once when I was very young. That’s another story, though – a very funny story, as it happens. But I should still go on painting. I should like to go on just as long as I can move my arm. Because there’s so much I still want to do. Sometimes I get all these ideas for new things, and I think if only I could get them all down in a single image: like slapping a sole on the wall, I’d like to slap this thing down, with all the facts and intuitions in it, and it would be there, with all its bones and things – complete and absolutely perfect.
    â€˜I never stop thinking about images, you know, I can’t just sit around and relax. The other night I had this dream, usually I don’t remember them, I was going down a street and my shadow was going along the wall with me and I reached out