I'm a living contemporary of the painters of the modernist movement. Picasso still had nearly twenty five years to go when I left school. Braque had fifteen years; Matisse six.

I haven't much liked any collective development since. A lot of the fashionable mind fucking hatched in Art Schools has left me cold. Ideas are cheap. The artist has to work it through all by himself, or herself, for art of any lasting beauty to emerge. Otherwise it's self promotion and often, nowadays, what the art critic Roger Scruton calls ' determination to portray the human world as unloveable' - dirty bedsheets.

I've understood what's happening and tend to lump it all in with advertising, that great post-modern me movement. As for advertising I've done that, but I didn't start trying to be an artist until late in life, trying to catch my own imagination with something that, when it's finished, goes beyond me and stands on its own.