People

"I try to get the images to be themselves – they are totally dissatisfied until they are themselves…they’re waiting for me to find them, and they’re not mine when I find them, they are themselves." — Gary Hume

"The human hand can do a lot of things. Exact levels of consciousness and chance are indefinable. There’s always a tension between doing and being done to – or channelling. It’s all one, since even the most deliberate act is made from the dark unknown stuff beneath the surface of your mind." —Rebecca Warren

“I sat for Lucian in one of his very run-down apartments, in a condemned terrace of empty houses. I sat for three hours at a time, I don’t know how many sittings. Lucian would, I think—memory fails—give me a lift at both ends. It was always very well heated and warm and there was often a restaurant meal afterwards, four times out of five paid for by Lucian. The whole process of painting from a person is so very familiar to me that I cannot remember anything as being remarkable." — Frank Auerbach

“Painting pictures is like being a man, really, even the way you stand or sit . . . has to do with the aggressive part. It has the kind of push, the thrust, which you must normally associate with what being a man is.” — Paula Rego

“I keep trying to get to the bottom of this question of how much past historical trauma is vibrating around, say, the buildings that were built with the wealth of that time. That atmosphere lingers. What does it do to us as protagonists within those spaces?” — Lubaina Himid

“You can’t make a line too slowly, you have to go at a certain speed, so the concentration needed is quite strong...You have to do it all at one go...it’s harder than anything else; so when they succeed, they’re much better drawings.” — David Hockney