“My Oxfordshire studio was designed by a good friend of mine, the architect Piers Gough, who coincidentally is a fellow Royal Academician. In order to get planning permission, the building had to look like a barn so that it fitted in with the local environment”

“Having this north-facing window very high up provides a good light for painting. In those days the land surrounding us was just open sheep meadows, so I thought I’d best take advantage of the view. That’s why the platform is up there, notionally for meditation and for the odd cup of tea”

“It turns out it’s very hard to design a curtain for a triangular window. These are sails: a guy came from a shipyard where they build yachts, and he abseiled up there to fix all the hooks. The sheeting is totally opaque. We’re in the countryside so it’s nice not to be shedding a huge amount of light into the environment”

“Painting. Even the sculptures, which are made somewhere else, come to me for painting. That’s what I am anyway, really – a painter. A painter who sculpts.”

“That wood sculpture occupies the size of a reasonable wardrobe, and the wood can’t go out of doors. It was very labour intensive to make that, with all the curving surfaces. I pretty quickly graduated to using steel or fibreglass – it’s easier to make the forms, and if they can go out of doors it increases the amount of people who might be able to own one!”

“I spent a lot of the ‘60s developing a very stylised, very volumetric language for describing the figure in paint. Then I thought, if I’m trying to make it look three-dimensional, why not just make it three-dimensional? That produced the furniture sculptures, and after that the implications took off in several directions”

“When I’m drawing, I tend to rule out a set of rectangles in the proportions I’ve chosen to work on. It means I can play with an idea and develop it. Sometimes they get worked up and become interesting little drawings, but remain illustrations and never become a painting. If one of them has ever become a painting, you can tell because I’ve squared it up (in a grid) in order to enlarge it”

“I quite like this photographer (bottom right)… I’ve done some paintings where he’s in the corner, because it’s a nice metaphor for what the artist is doing”

“The painting on the left is of Kate Moss. I had a commission to paint her, and I ended up doing three paintings and a couple of sculptures”

“If you’re interested in the subject, you know, it’s irresistible to cut these things out. Some people collect pots because they’re potters… I’m interested in anatomy”

“I heard a long time ago that Cezanne had something like 30 different greens on his palette. Nothing is new…. I don’t have 30 greens but I’m up in the 20s on some of the colours”

So many people think that I use an airbrush, but no – if you’ve been doing it long enough it’s just about having the right variety of brushes. I’ve been using this one for years. I don’t have an assistant… The only reason I can see for having an assistant is that it would be nice to have someone clean your brushes! It just is such a drag"