I always paint without a model, because being a conceptual painter, being a painter whose interest is in ideas, the model gets in the road, prevents me from meditating about it in such a way that I’m absorbed by hosts of visual details instead of by the idea. What I’m interested in in painting is people, of course, principally, how they live, how they behave, how they get the faces they deserve, how they can bear to put up with a life which seems so curiously tragic.
Of course I know that to be interested in people’s behaviour for a painter is most impure. It’s called literary, and in our day nothing could be a greater sin than to be a literary painter; but now I’m old enough to feel that it’s a waste of time to apologise for not painting in some other way, and the fact is that I’m still always fascinated by people and their behaviour. And yet at the same time, it’s not enough to just paint pictures of ideas; at the same time we must put it into a visual form which is as complete as any abstract visual form. And here, there’s always a conflict between the demands of the idea and the demands of the form.
And in any case, I’m always dubious about the remarks painters make about their own work, because what we so often say is rather what we would like to have done than what we’ve really done.
