FRANK AUERBACH

FRANK AUERBACH: I think that the very earliest influence was a horror of having to work in a bank or an office, a desire for a free and creative life. The writings of - for instance; William Blake, John Cooper Powys and Joyce Cary. This has finally resulted in my working every day in a rigid but self-imposed schedule. Then, at school, random influences, for instance, Paul Klee, Edward Burra, Viaminer, artists who I found it possible to imitate. Later, first Picasso, then Rembrandt and virtually the whole of art history.

FA: The last influence is, of course, still operative. I do not have fixed opinions, just reactions, but I am susceptible to the influence of all the great artists known to everybody and some less popular figures, like Albert Pinkham Ryder, Gerald Wilde, Antonin Artaud and others too numerous to list.

FA: On the whole the morning and the evening; afternoons are often not so good.

FA: This has really been answered - the list would be too long to remember. Rembrandt, Constable, Turner, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto, Velasquez, Whistler, Giacometti, Matisse, Leger, Rodin, Michelangelo, Picasso, Mexican and Japanese sculpture, Hogarth, Daumier, Cezanne, Seurat, De Kooning - everybody you can think of.

FA: I never work with an audience, I can't do this. The process depends on the highest degree of nervous concentration. But I have models seven times a week and they are, of course, present when I work.

FA: I do not have a rigid method. But I tend to do drawings before starting a landscape and then many more as I proceed. I tend to start directly on to the canvas when working from a model, but there are many changes.

FA: I am not a great connoisseur of my own work, but I think drawings are more revelatory than paintings and it might be one of my better drawings.

FA: Yes I do, but it is not a question of "going back", I feel that I am going forward.

FA: I destroy things every day in the act of working and often recall a picture I had considered finished in order to rework it. I wish that I had done so more often.

FA: I am profoundly uncomfortable with what I have, as you put it "achieved".

FA: In addition to the artistic influences, I am influenced by my current private life, my feelings about it and my energy level and state of health.