Peter Wright

“You could always go on changing things but there comes a time when you have to decide to stop.”

“I've had to do all kinds of jobs to pay the rent. I've even worked in a Cornish tin mine.”

“I felt the need to get back to painting and I thought the best way was to start drawing, so I enrolled in a life drawing class. I soon discovered that people made very interesting subjects and I am still surprised that I had never discovered it before.”

“I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.”

“I used to paint landscapes without any people in them but now I paint people who happen to be in a particular place. They might be outside a pub, or on a beach or in a studio. They might have clothes on or they might not.”

“I have to experiment with methods and I'm trying to find an authentic way of making an equivalent of the living, breathing person within the limits of a single picture.”

“When I look at some of my old work, the pieces I find most interesting are the ones with people in them.”

“I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?”

“As a kid I quite fancied the romantic, Bohemian idea of being an artist. I expect I thought I could escape from the difficulties of maths and spelling. Maybe I thought I would avoid the judgement of the establishment.”

“I had been living with dialysis for three years or so, and the new kidney felt like a reprieve, a new gift of life. I felt alive again and I guess that has had an effect on my use of colour.”

“I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.”

“Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.”

“I tried to learn the violin for a while.”