My most sentimental possession is... a photograph of my dad when he was 16 and in the Royal Navy which has a pride of place on the mantelpiece in my dining room.
My tip for updating a room is... to take everything out of it and look at it like a blank canvas and start again.
If I lost everything in the house... the thing that I would probably keep would be my bed. It’s cost me £5,000 from Liberty. If there’s one thing that you should have it’s a good bed because you spend a long time in it.
I love... the Guggenheim museum in New York. I just love the Frank Lloyd Wright – it looks great on the outside but I can’t stand it inside. I think the indoor space is just not made for displaying works of art.
My favourite art gallery in the world is... the Tate Modern. I also like the Musée de l'Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris with the Monets going around the wall down in the Oval rooms.
When I left art school... I did some things on stage which was like doing a bit of performance art which ended up on television so it’s been art all along. I thought I was doing performance art; it turned out to be comedy.
You start painting... as soon as you can put a scratch on a piece of paper when you’re a baby. You either like doing it or you don’t. And you then become a colourist. You either continue or you don’t. I’ve been doing it forever.
My current exhibition... is a fairly figurative narrative show. I started off doing a painting of a sky car, which is a flying car, and I put a dramatic title on it, ‘The Tormented Skies’. I thought it was very funny because it’s one of those World War 2 films but the aeroplane is obviously not sufficient to warrant a film made about it. I started doing more and more of them with these titles on them. Then I wrote a story about the artist, Alan Todd, who I invented so it became a kind of narrative show.
At art school... I got really into pop art by my friends Peter Blake and Colin Self... I now like Louise Bourgeois.
You should... collect the art that you like. If you like it, you’ve got to live with it unless you want to stash it away in a bank. It’s up to you – I’d rather live with stuff. I like to do bartering but I can do that in my position. I say, ‘look, I’ll do a swap with you – I’ll take this painting for that one.’ I love doing that. Colin Self is bringing me one tonight that is a swap.
Being a celebrity can hamper... people think that being an artist is my second job. It is in fact my first job. Being famous is a great help because people come to see what you’re up to if you’re well known, on television for doing something else.
I know Ron [Ronnie Wood] very well... and he’s very good but he’s a Rolling Stone first before anything else. It’s always going to be ‘Rolling Stone does some paintings’ rather than ‘Ronnie Wood the painter is in the Stones’.
