“In my paintings I am looking to build up an absolute welter of complexity. The world is an intensely complex place and it’s a great deal of work to make that feel simple and flowing. I’d like my paintings to be something like the Apple operating system – it’s a wonderful outcrop of simplicity interfacing an enormous complexity, people can engage with it immediately. There’s a simple rightness and pleasure connected to that. In a funny way my paintings are big operating systems, written in lines of visual and historical code. I’m interested in what it is to have a consistent and coherent identity. My work offers partial narratives of what constitutes you as the identifier. All the things in the pictures have some kind of a journey, a kind of nostalgia for the known: TV, comics, novels, different influences that have reached through to me. They imply a coherent personal or psychological identity, but also a wider cultural identity as well.”