Chris Ofili

I love Manchester. I love Manchester United. But I would really struggle to be creative there. I feel a bit lost, over-familiar maybe. Maybe too stuck in my own web of history. ”

The Notorious B.I.G.'s album 'Ready to Die' is an incredible chart of a man's life - it begins with his birth, you hear his mother giving birth, and it goes through the decades. ”

When I left the Royal College, I decided I would only make paintings that I would want to look at myself, that felt close to my life. ”

I try to bring all that I am to my work and all that I experience. That includes how people react to the way I am - the prejudice and the celebrations. ”

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams. ”

Change is not indecision. ”

There's a magic that comes from playing entirely to who you are. I've got my specialist subject - in the Mastermind sense - and I wouldn't change it, or who I am. ”

The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time. ”

There was a point in time where the thought of people even talking about me made me anxious. Physically. ”

Death & the Roses' came out of ideas about flagellation and guilt and from looking at Piero della Francesca's 'The Flagellation of Christ.' ”