To me, all I have is my work I don’t have anything else.
If it feels like it’s let me down it kills me, I feel so hurt by it
But when it’s good it’s like the best feeling in the whole world.
Nothing can compete with it, nothing at all
Everything I’ve done is related to art and my own art
I didn’t care how broke I was, I didn’t care about what was going on in my life
that was my priority. Nothing else overtook that, ever
But when I do it it’s like some force
it’s like some wild animal coming out of me a volcano erupting
Do you think that’s why you never wanted to collaborate with anyone?
Yeah possibly, because I’m so protective over it
I’m so protective over the whole act as an artist and what it means to me
My usual reaction to collaboration is “No, I don’t want to do it”
or I spend a long time thinking about it
Now, our collaboration was quite weird.
The whole Edgar Allan Poe thing was your idea
and that’s what led on to me doing the painting.
In a sense it started when I sent you the book to read
Tracy says: “The story of the black cat filled me with repulsion, mainly because of my love of cats”
It had a strange effect, like telling a child something they don’t need to know
Something frightening.
The idea of hate and love, and their need to be so close together
I sent you the whole compendium for some reason, I don’t know why
the last page of that story had been ripped out
You thought that was cryptic and that I’d sent you a message
I did yes, but you didn’t know it was missing did you?
You were trying to work around that idea
The painting I ended up doing was myself
like, dead and gone
and in a strange twilight world
So it was a collaboration not between me and you
it was a collaboration with me, and you and Edgar Allan Poe
In so far as it is a collaboration together I really like it
because I can’t really tell which part she did and which part I did
Maybe that’s because she painted over all the bits that I did. I don’t know
I think I did paint over them
but it was a true collaboration, because you actually stood over me while I made the painting
One of the good things about collaboration can be that
when you do something on a painting that you’re really attached to
it might be in itself a great bit of painting
but actually for the painting as a whole it’s a kind of poison
What it’s doing is it’s stopping the rest of the painting getting resolved
Someone else can come in and see that right away
they’re not attached to it because they didn’t send 10 years painting it
so they just paint it out, and that can be a really great thing
I think it was the first time I went to New York
and they were advertising this show by Basquiat and Warhol
and the gallerist had seen fit to promote it as a boxing match
Warhol vs Basquiat
I think my idea of a collaboration is perhaps something a little bit more harmonious
When I did my collaboration with Louise Bourgeois
it took me two-and-a-half years to do
because the last thing I wanted to do was to be competing with Louise for that place on the image
I’ve just done another collaboration which I’ve just remembered, with Louise
a collaboration with the dead
As if I’m working with her, thinking of her thinking what she would be thinking
You’re sort of second guessing what that person’s going to say
Have you ever done collaboration with yourself in a way?
If you come back to a piece that you started five, ten years before
and when you come back to it you’re sort of a different person
Yeah well, some of my paintings I spend over ten years doing all that
as you say it’s like a collaboration with the past as well
Because you cannot be in the same mind frame that you was when you started it
Things have really changed
I think that being an artist is quite a lonely pursuit
and it is outside of society in lots of ways, and existential
And no matter how much you collaborate you have your friends and you do things
at the end of the day you’re on your own
you’re on your own creating and making things