You have a sen... you have a vision for the picture,
you have a vision about what this picture will look like.
I always have this,
this is how I work on every single canvas I do.
I have an idea of what this thing should look like.
Basically it involves all your experience
and your learning and your technical ability
to realise that vision.
Em, and that's quite an intensive,
a very intense process to take place.
You kind of know what you're aiming for.
Obviously every artist's got their own particular journey
that they... or path that they follow
and in some respects it's not something that's mapped out.
You've not really got any idea
of where you're going at any given time.
I think increasingly, looking back at the very early work,
em, for example a painting like The Troubled City
which has this multitude of figures in it,
multitude of heads and faces.
Very much based on my experiences of the city,
the city of Glasgow that I work in
but also visiting other cities in Europe.
Particularly at that momentous time
when the Berlin Wall came down
and it was such a great sense of flux.
That kind of interregnum, as some people have called it.
You know in a funny sort of way
the crowd became too amorphous
and difficult for me to deal with, you know,
it became this rather abstract thing
and I wanted to focus more and more on the individual,
the experience of the individual
within that historical process and within the city itself.
You can see how portraiture would come out of that,
the move towards a depiction
of the individual sitter as it were.
One of the primary influences on my work when I was a student
was Francis Bacon.
Um, you know the part of that London school,
you had people like Auerbach and Kitaj and Freud,
who are very much portrait painters.
But Bacon for me was the main influence on the work,
and he was very much a portrait painter.
So actually it wasn't a radical departure in any way
it was something that was always...
had always been buried there, as it were,
that I actually came back and revisited.
With the painting The Three Oncologists,
the Scottish National Portrait Gallery approached me
with this idea for the commission.
I think it had been decided that
the three protagonists in that particular painting you know,
were worthy of a portrait,
which meant that they were esteemed and significant individuals.
I had never, until that time,
taken on a portrait commission.
I mean in some respects, a lot of my work is about portraiture,
indirect portraiture if you like,
recordings of what I've seen in the streets,
but the idea of doing a portrait, an official portrait,
was something that I'd never tried before.
The first meeting I had with them,
the three men were together I think for the very first time themselves,
even though they were all kind of in charge
of this oncology unit at Dundee.
So I had to get to know each one individually
and most importantly find out about their work,
which involved observing them.
With the two surgeons, Cuschieri and Steele,
I had to go into theatre with them
for many, many hours to watch them carry out
the very important and, in fact, globally important
surgery that they were doing.
You know I just had to watch them at work
and see what they did
and, em, you know, that in itself was fascinating.
You know, they don't call it an operating theatre for nothing,
it was a very theatrical thing to observe.
One of the things I realised quite early on in the portrait
was that there was no way I was gonna be able to do a portrait
that involved sitting the three sitters down
and me bringing an enormous canvas
into the hospital or wherever
and, you know, spending many, many
leisurely hours painting them,
that wasn't going to happen.
So it was actually Julie Lawson that came up with this idea,
and she'd seen some of my previous work
where I'd been making paintings of life and death masks
in the collection of Edinburgh University,
and she said why don't you make casts of their faces.
Ahmm, which was a brilliant idea
because it basically gave me a reference.
I mean one of the fundamental ideas
behind the picture was what,
when I had a brief discussion with Sir David Lane here
about the nature of cancer and he said that um,
people saw cancer as a kind of darkness
it's just this dark thing
and that their job is to go in there and retrieve people
from the darkness as it were.
Every picture has this key that, you know,
you're just looking for that thing that will unlock the image,
and that was, that phrase was enough to unlock the thing for me.
You know, it wasn't what you call a traditional portrait
by any stretch of the imagination.
In fact I actually have difficulty thinking of it as a portrait,
I mean I've gone through the motions of calling it a portrait
and I've made reference to...
you know I've given the names of the individuals
in the title of the painting
but, for me it's more than a portrait,
it's about my experience of meeting these three people
and what I think about them.
It's come through the filter of my own experience
and my own memory.
It's not a traditional portrait painting
in the sense that, you know,
the person is sitting in front of you
and you do a painting of them
and you get a likeness of them and everyone claps.
You know, it's not like that.
This was a much deeper process for me.