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- I like to make pictures.

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I've made a few sculptures,

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I've made a little bit of pottery,

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but basically I'm a painter.

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I'm not complaining, but I've had to overcome

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a lot of early success in the sense that the early things

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that people saw were very commercial things.

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(soft ethereal music)

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I was 40 when I had my first exhibition.

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It's quite old, really.

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But, that's just the way it was for me.

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If you like visual things, you know,

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that's what you like, you like all kinds of things

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and the only criteria should be, was it any good?

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You know, do you like it?

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I am very Sydney.

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I live beside Sydney Harbour

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which is a fantastic place to be.

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I kayak on the harbour, I feed the fish,

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I don't like to catch them anymore.

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I feed them, in fact, if anybody comes down here

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and they say, is there any fish around?

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I say, oh, no, there's no fish around here.

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No fish around here.

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But of course there are, top of the tide,

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there's eight Big Bream, I almost know them by name,

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come around each morning.

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There's parts of the harbour close by here, where we live,

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that hasn't changed forever.

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No houses, look exactly the same

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as when aboriginal people lived here

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or even later when Captain Cook came through.

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That's one of the great things about Sydney, I think,

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is that they've still preserved

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that natural landscape in some parts.

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Such a beautiful place.

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Almost inevitably you'll make pictures

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that try to be beautiful.

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You can't be as beautiful as itself,

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you can never be as beautiful as nature, you can not.

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But all you can do is to use that environment

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to lead you to make a painting

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that somehow might have the feeling of it.

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It's a complicated picture

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and it clearly set out to show that there's a kind of

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public face that I have.

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That's most of the time smiling

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and most of the time optimistic.

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But there's another face,

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maybe another even two faces within there

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that I hope shows a sadder side

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or a different kind of sensitivity.

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Glenn designed a house for us.

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We've known him a long time, he's a lovely man.

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And I did make a small drawing,

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but I wanted to make the painting as simple

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and as elegant as one of his buildings.

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I love the fact that in the portrait gallery,

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you've sometimes shown them both together

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and it just shows

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his elegant simplicity

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against the kind of complication of my self portrait

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which, you know, I would say straight to the psychiatrist,

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looking at that painting.

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(laughs)