Gary Hume

“I love to see a wood full of bluebells. Growing up in the Kent countryside, I have special memories of this brief annual spectacle.”

“People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's.”

“I'm more and more fascinated in my own work. I work from 10 A.M. until about 9 P.M., but it's not an obsession, it's a pleasure. There's never enough time.”

“Now, I love painting. I love looking. I love the fact that they don't move. They constantly change with the light. They are sort of patient.”

“All art becomes history as soon as it is made, so it is inevitably part of a tradition. It doesn't matter a toss if it is in paint or in film; it is all art.”

“I found that gloss paint suited me entirely, and its qualities still intrigue me. It's viscous and fluid and feels like a pool. It's highly reflective, which means there are layers of looking. You look at the picture, and you look at the surface, then you look at the reflection in the surface behind you, then you look at yourself.”

“Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.”

“I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, 'How am I going to make a film if I can't write?' I didn't really comprehend that someone else would do that bit.”

“I don't make political work. I don't make work that criticises the state. I make as human work as I can.”

“The surface is all you get of me.”

“A painting should be tough; it should have muscle, but I have to find some tenderness in it, too. There has to be that dynamic.”

“My desire to be an artist really came out of being broke and unemployed and incapable of holding a job down. That's what it was driven by for sure.”

“I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse.”

“I'd like to give people leaden boots in galleries, so they'd be a bit slower in front of my paintings. And that's because I spend so much time looking at them. I can look at them a long, long time without getting bored. I disappear.”

“I'm probably creative for half an hour a day. The rest of the time, I'm just doing what's necessary to make that creativity visible.”

“I'm probably not going to develop to a final state as an artist. Like, become better and better, more and more refined. Become 'pure.' I don't think that's going to happen to me, because I don't really see that as something I want to explore.”

“The disenfranchised should be going to art school - not the franchised.”

“If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.”

“I do think you get lonelier and lonelier being an artist as you get older.”

“I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.”