- The older I get, the more I go back
to the same motifs or subjects over and over.
That repetition helps one explore things very deeply.
So rather than be concerned
that I'm repeating myself,
which I might be,
I feel like there's nearly always something more
to be looked at in a subject.
It's unbelievably thrilling
to be having a show at The Met.
I would never have imagined that this could happen.
I've been painting for 30 years
so it's kind of intimidating
and a little intense
to be thinking of seeing a lot of works again
that I haven't seen for a long time.
I think the largest work is 'Father of the Bride'.
I think I'd been looking a lot at Pollock at the time.
I was obsessed with that moment in Pollock
where figuration is coming back.
And people always talk about abstraction and figuration
but actually, it's how do you have both in the same place?
I was also looking a lot at the El Greco funeral
with the crowd of faces.
So my paintings started having this sense of teeming bodies
and those sort of figures
that are both thick, lush paint
but there's also faces, figures, body parts,
all sort of emerging
and disappearing back into the sort of general mass.
And that tends to be what I'm drawn to
in other people's work.
(inspiring classical music)
I use drawing a lot.
I draw pretty much every day.
I almost always draw from photographs,
from other people's art.
It's really a way of getting information
but also understanding what they were doing.
And I find like I only really understand a painting
once I've copied it.
I love copying super complex things like a Bruegel,
Bruegels 'Children's Games'
or 'Carnival and Lent'
and the painting 'Carnival and Lent' is in the show.
I came to that through Bruegel.
I never work on just one thing at a time.
Certainly with small things,
I might start four or five or six.
I will always start at least two,
even large ones at the same time
and start them in a similar way.
So they're almost like mirror images of each other.
The woman looking in a mirror is a subject I've returned to
so many times over and over again.
It's the world reflected back at you
but you also feel like you're seeing into another world.
It is that sense of looking into another world
that's so fascinating about art in the first place.
And in fact, in 'The Only Game in Town',
there is that sense of the optical illusion
of my wife and my mother-in-law
which is the three quarter profile of a young lady
but it also can be the face of an old woman
as one of the famous double images
like the duck rabbit
as well as the skull in 'Memento Mori'.
As a child, I had a major fascination
with that sort of thing.
You know, it's fascinating
to try and see both readings at once
and failing to
and I think when I first started with 'Aujourd'hui Rose',
which was the first double image
using a skull that I had painted and drew,
like in a way,
I think I wasn't really thinking about death yet.
I was thinking about youth
and life actually,
or in a way, maybe it's a slightly distancing way
for me to be able to think about death.
You can look at a horrific subject in a painting
that you wouldn't wanna look at in real life.
Or for me, even looking at meat and fish,
'cause I'm a lifelong vegetarian
and I would never even look in a butcher shop
when I was little
and I still don't particularly like looking at meat
but I love looking at paintings of meat
and I love paintings of hunts.
That Rubens in The Met's collection,
I've looked at a lot
with that kind of incredibly violent image
that's also the most sumptuous,
gorgeous thing you've ever seen.
And I've made my own hunt paintings
which eventually led to the still lives
and you'll see this throughout the exhibition.
It was the obvious next step
to have the bounty of this murderous activity.
I actually just started copying
from Fran Snyders in particular,
another 17th century, mainly Flemish painting.
I mean they are very decadent
and in paintings like 'Lobsters,
Oysters, Cherries, and Pearls'
I do think they've got
this kind of end of the world quality about them
but at the same time, we've got all these riches
but there is a sort of disintegrating feeling about them.
One of the things I love about painting
is its ability to embody more than one thing at once.
Especially in the last five years or so,
there's almost been this amalgamation of imagery
where something will be both a hunt
and a shipwreck in a garden with the nude
and I'm kind of really enjoying juggling all those things
because in a way,
the impulse is the same with all of them.
I think seeing everything together
is gonna be very exciting,
but it's also scary
to see how things hold up over time,
see how they work together,
to see if it all adds up to something.
Just really to see how the works interact.
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