I've always been interested in gardens.
I was sent off to stay with my grandmother;
that was the beginning of the war and also my father died.
I was sort of sent out as a gardener for all my grandmother's friends
and I got very interested in plants,
and also I'd go up the hill behind the house and saw a lot of these plants
and I began to look at them and even... dig them up.
My grandfather was an engineer,
but by the time I knew him,
he had given up the business and he travelled.
He was mainly going to Europe - to France
and Spain and Italy
and he would bring things back.
He was just interested in... in everything, I think.
I think painters do collect; a lot.
People give me things; they know I'm a collector of everything.
I think these are Spanish;
I just liked the box and the design on it.
These are from Italy, they're sweets.
Don't know where these came from.
It's a rattle.
Yes there's one or two rattles, I think, I have.
I think Elizabeth Blackadder's art is very widely known in this country and it's much loved,
but I wonder if it's had the critical attention that it really deserves.
There is nothing that seems particularly forced or overly conceptual.
I think in all a common thread is, that sense of being excited by,
being stimulated by, the world that is around her
and that continues to feed her, to nourish what she wants to do as an artist
and drives her every day to this day to make extraordinary paintings.
John was always in the big studio and I was here.
I probably asked him to come and see 'what do you think?' and so on,
but I wouldn't say so much about his paintings - not because I didn't like them, but...
I knew that he knew what he was going to do.
And sometimes I didn't know what I was going to do, so much!
We were both very interested in some of the Japanese watercolours.
There was a big Japanese exhibition in London that set us off.
It was quite difficult to get things like kimonos.
I mean a kimono in Japan in a shop was a fantastic price
and they didn't really like second-hand things.
Well I think we did get one, but otherwise we'd collect things,
just things that mostly I wanted to paint.
I don't know that John was so interested in painting objects.
I don't really talk about my art.
It's the paintings; that's it! That's it! It's not...
Why I choose to paint certain things,
or how I paint and how I use the paint in different ways...
you know one thing leads to another, very much.
I suppose I do change a lot; you hope you change too.