Hi everyone, welcome to everyone joining us for today's talk. As Stephanie mentioned, I'm placed in the Vancouver Art Gallery, which is located on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Today I'm joined from Venice, Italy by the artist Michael Craig-Martin for this very special conversation. Now before I introduce Michael, a few words of housekeeping. Please drop any question you might have during the talk.
into the Q&A, and we will hopefully have time to address a few towards the end of the talk. Now I'll briefly introduce Michael. Sir Michael Craig Martin is a leading figure of British conceptual art, probing the relationship between objects and images, harnessing the human capacity to imagine absent forms through symbols and pictures. In the 1990s, he made a decisive shift to painting.
developing his hallmark style of precise, bold outlines, demarcating flat planes of intensely vibrant colors. He is famous as an artist, but also as a teacher, as a professor of fine art at Goldsmiths College in London. Michael became a powerful influence on a generation of his students who would become known as the young British artists, including Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume, among others.
Alongside his incredible achievements as an artist and educator, In 2016, he was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours for his services to art. Welcome, Michael. Hi, Melissa.
Nice to see you. Very nice to see you. So let's dive right in.
We have a few slides of your work to complement the conversation today. And I'd like to begin chatting about your early artwork and sculpture. Could you tell us a little... We are going right back 1967. Yes, could you tell us a little bit about this image we see here?
Well, this is a work from the first group of works that I showed as an artist. It was shown in first in 1969 and I made a group of works of sculptures that were based on box forms and Unlike, I saw minimalism as too abstract and too pure, and I wanted to make it more ordinary, more, my sense of something being ordinary was very strong right from the beginning. So my boxes are literally boxes, and they have hinges, sometimes they have handles.
In this one, I've made the box so it has two lids, but each lid is just slightly too big so that lids can never actually close. You close one, then the other one doesn't fit. So there's a sense of impossibility in it, but it's just playing with the very simple object, which is normal to us, which is a box with hinges and lids.
And that leads to my next question. You've spoken before about function and how sculptures can engage the function of usefulness. So this is a box that never closes.
So in a way, would you say that you are playing with the idea of function? I'm trying to maintain the sense of functionality as far as I can. Although one of the things that's interesting about art is the sense that it is functionless and that it is required to perform function. But I... It struck me that most use of found objects or real objects, things that you would describe as objects, for instance, Duchamp's ready-mades, what's removed is their functionality. The bottle rack does not contain, you don't use tall bottles, and the urinal, you certainly don't use the fountain.
as it was originally intended. So I thought, well, what if I tried to maintain that sense that a thing has been used as close to how it was intended as possible? Can we go to the next slide, please? Yes, this is a table with four buckets of water.
The water in the buckets and the buckets weigh exactly the same amount. as the tabletop and they are suspended, the buckets are suspended from the ceiling by pulleys which go down to the tabletop. So what we have is that the objects on the table are supporting the table. rather than the table supporting the objects. So it's this play between ideas of functionality, but it's a table, so the things around the table, there's the buckets they're supposed to be, have water in them.
Everything is used as close as possible to how it would normally function, and yet there's a play with it that takes it away from that. And what's your interest in using everyday objects? Well, to be honest, that's very hard to explain.
And it goes right back to my earliest thoughts about art. And there was something about the idea that I thought the essence of things should be closer to us than we imagine. And that sometimes people look for the essence of things in things that are unusual and extreme.
And I thought, really. the essence of things is right in front of our face. It's right here all the time, but it's very hard to recognize.
And for me, ordinary objects, because they're imbued with so much meaning to us, because they're so familiar to us, because of their ubiquitousness, that we kind of lose sight of them. And one of the things that's interesting about art is as soon as you use something in a work of art, you elevate it. If you make a painting of something, you automatically have given it a certain kind of grandeur that the object might not originally have.
And so I'm trying to bring that sense of importance to things. I mean, here in the milk bottles, there's a shelf with milk bottles on it, but the shelf is tipped, but the water in the milk bottles forms a horizon line. And I thought milk bottles were a wonderful object to use because they literally have no value at all. In the days when you had milk deliveries, you didn't own the bottles, you didn't buy the bottles, you bought the milk. And you put the bottle outside the door and the milkman gave you a new bottle.
And so it's a literally valueless object turned into something that maybe appears to have value. This is so wonderful. I was really captivated by this work and I've just noticed now, as you've explained, the water level and how looking at the water level itself is almost like, you know, another work inside or looking at the horizon in a way, just looking at the object in a very different way and noticing it in a different way. That's very much what I wanted was for the water to be like the ocean, but it was the horizon. That's the horizon line.
in the work and trying to get the water to continue right through the whole set of bottles. So I think moving on to your paintings, I think what we're doing now, I guess it's interesting, do you see this as a painting? No.
It's a wall drawing, but in, I mean, what happens to me in the, I mean, because the few things that we've looked at, there are dozens of works made at that period. I'm recovering 10 years of my career in three works. But what happened to me was that having spent so long dealing with real objects, I got interested in the idea of images of objects instead of the objects.
And I realized that most artists who use representational imagery take representation for granted and then use it. And I wanted to explore the nature of what two-dimensional imagery was, what it was like, how does it work, what's it do? And so I then started to make drawings of the kinds of objects that I'd previously used, the real object.
And I made the drawings using a single line, always the same kind of line. I made it all in tape so there's no personal, it's not done with a pencil, there's no inflection in the line, because I wanted my drawings to have the character of the objects I was drawing. All these things are mass produced. Mass produced objects, when we get them, are perfect.
We don't want, if we go to the supermarket and there's something in the supermarket and it's damaged, we don't buy it. We want it to be perfect when we get it. And so I wanted my drawings to have that kind of natural perfection, which is in the mass produced objects themselves. So that's why they had the character they did. And then I started to try to explore what could you do with impact?
what did images allow that objects did not? And here's the first one, the first things I did in 1978. The images can be transparent to each other. That's in itself is a kind of amazing thing.
And what's really extraordinary is if you look at the center of this, there's a kind of confusion of lines. But if you say, hammer, you can see the hammer perfectly. As soon as you focus on one, the other lines kind of drop away, don't they? They become... part of a background and it's amazing how easy it is for us to read something in what would apparently be a confusion.
I thought all these aspects of two-dimensionality were really interesting. And how did you choose these particular three objects to be put together? Well, when I started to draw, I drew in those days, I made the original drawing on a piece of acetate using very thin tape and it was always A4 size, like letter size. And my idea, if I drew a sandal or a piano, I drew it as big as I could on that size sheet of paper. So every image, as you can see, is more or less the same size.
And what I wanted to do was to remove the senses of hierarchy from things, big and small. expensive and cheap, useful and not so, you know, all these different things that we use to discriminate and to give hierarchies to things. So my idea was to treat each image as though it was equal to the others. And so I tried to put together a set of images in which there is no narrative. I'm not pursuing a narrative, but I am trying to play with it because the objects are so identifiable.
I don't ever want you to think what is that. I want you to not even notice. You instantly recognize it and then you look at what it is that I'm presenting to you. Can we go to the next slide please? Yes, following this now we're into the 80s and I did a large series of works which are which came from the from the drawings but here All the black lines that you see against the white wall are made of metal.
Every time the line goes into the two panels, the red and the blue panel, those are painted lines. So it's a mixture of a physical line and a painted line, but they're given continuity from the one to the other. And so the work stands.
three or four inches from the wall as a relief. And what I was trying to do is something that I come to later, will come to it later, which is in a sense to physicalize drawing, to get the drawing to take on a kind of independent physicality, rather than just existing on the surface of another. Here it's not actually on the surface, it's actually been lifted away from the wall. been lifted off the surface and has a kind of sculptural existence. I mean, I thought of all of these works, like the wall drawings, I thought of the wall drawings really as being sculpture and they came from my practice as a sculptor.
I didn't come to this from a point of view as a painter, and you can see they're obviously not painterly in the sense that one normally is painterly, but I'm I'm basically a constructor. I put things together as an artist. And I think of these things as, in a sense, as sculptures that are without mass.
They are presents without mass. I was just going to say, I think that you've succeeded there. If we can just quickly go back a little. It really looks like a two-dimensional object placed on top of a three-dimensional object.
And it's... It's, I think, playing with the perception in such a way that is very interesting. I think it's very important that everything, so much of our world, our understanding of the world has to do with our ability, our amazing ability to read two-dimensional images.
If we couldn't be doing this right now, if we couldn't read two-dimensional images. The reason your dog isn't home watching TV while you're out is because they don't read two-dimensional images. And this is a staggering ability. And to me, if you go back to all early languages, you go back to hieroglyphics, you go back to early Chinese writing, it all starts with pictograms.
It starts with pictures. It starts with images of things, which then become abstracted into... what we know of as language, a verbal language, but it starts with images. So the basis of all of our ability to communicate really comes through our ability to understand that here we have a picture of trousers and there are no trousers.
There are no trousers, it's a picture, but we have the sense of the presence of the trousers which are not present. And that gives us incredible abstract freedom for the imagination, because we can move through things that are not an understanding of things which you don't have to have in place. Can we go to the next slide?
Yes, we're making a very big jump here. But this does give you a sense of what happened from the... the trousers, the French trousers, of course they were called French trousers because it was red, yellow, and blue, red, white, and blue.
But in the 90s I started to make installations, giant installations filling whole museums, and I started to use colored walls, painted rooms with images in them. from, and what happened was as the decade went on, towards the second half of the decade, I started to turn to paintings. Up to that point, until it was the mid-90s, I didn't make any paintings.
I did very few, I did a few paintings. I was trying to play with it, but I couldn't find a way to make paintings. And then, towards the mid-90s, I started to find a way in which I felt like make paintings and the paintings start as single images of single objects and for me this is you know in a way it's like the essence of what I do which is you look there is one thing and there's one painting I don't make headphones I make paintings of headphones and so there's the object that I'm picturing which is the headphones and there's the object I make, which is the painting, and I'm trying to bring the two together as closely as possible. And I think that's a very unique distinction, and I think it's really important to understand the kind of very interesting difference that you're trying to do here with that distinction. Can we go over to the next slide?
I think we'll be going back to this idea of headphones later when we look at... your public artwork. But perhaps we could talk a little bit about the objects here and knowing. Yes, I mean here that there's a painting where there's a number of objects. You see, you have to remember that each object I draw, I've drawn individually.
So each object is containing its own perspective because I didn't draw the, I didn't, this never existed as a something I drew. I drew each one separately and then put them together in this way. And what I've done here is I'm kind of mimicking perspective.
So I have the bigger objects, which are actually the smallest objects, are at the front. The mid-sized objects are in the middle. And the biggest objects, because they're the furthest away, become small. But actually, we don't know whether, you know, maybe it's just a very small ladder.
and a very big globe. It's only us that's filling in this idea that this is a perspectival space. And again, these are questions of the essence of how we read images, that we do this very complex thing of understanding. And I always think too, if I give you images here, like the flashlight, everybody knows that it's a flashlight.
I haven't told you it's a flashlight. You can't see the bulb. It's not on. You don't know how big it is. I'm not telling you how big it is.
I'm not telling you what it's made of. I'm not telling you what it's for. And yet you look at that and you know all of those things.
I don't give you any of this information. I give you an amazingly minimal amount of information with an image. And the audience fills in all the things that you need to know.
in order to understand which look you're at. It's quite extraordinary how we do this. Sorry, just I have a quick question just going back. I wanted to ask about your use of color here just because it's quite unconventional for an object that we immediately associate with here.
So for example, we associate fire extinguishers being red and And even the use of brown for the metronome is the, I don't know what that's called, the ticker part of the metronome is kind of camouflaged into the brown as well as the stool. So I'd like to ask you how you choose your sense of color. Well, what happened to me in the, it goes back again to the installations.
I did an installation. I had never used color before. And then. I had the opportunity to do an installation in a gallery in Paris and there were a set of seven rooms and I had this idea that I would paint each room a different color and I would paint on the wall two images, this kind of image, but painted directly on the wall. And so I thought, well, seven colors, one for each room, what color should they be?
And I thought, well, there aren't many more than seven colors. What are they? There's red, yellow, blue.
just like these objects which you can name, every object I draw you can name, what are the named colors? Red, yellow, blue, pink, green. So I painted each room one of those colors and I made each room as forcefully that color as possible.
And when I saw it, I realized that I had liberated myself in terms of color. because the colors were so intense and had such a passion in relation to each other and I, it made me realize eventually that I could use these colors in the objects as well as behind the objects. And that whereas my, I draw everything a hundred percent accurately as I can.
I never distort anything, I draw things as close to a picture that you read that exactly as we experience it. But when it comes to the color, I allow myself total freedom. Anything can be any color. I can make it, if I want to make it yellow, I make it yellow.
If I don't, I make it green instead. I can make it pink. As soon as you allow yourself this kind of liberation, the combination of the liberation of the color with the austerity of the drawing seems to me to be.
to give the work a very different kind of dynamic than it had in the beginning, because you're getting this play between the passion of the color and the intensity of it and the absurdity of it. But it also gives a sense of specificness and life to these objects, which are drawn in this very precise way. Absolutely, and it's such a wonderful way to put it, this liberation of color.
um could we go to the next slide i think the next slide is about fragments perhaps you could uh chat a little bit about how we've gone in a different direction here well again you know i it's a i have this career of exploring what is the world of two of the two-dimensional two-dimensional image and part of what uh of course if uh what two dimensions allow as we've already seen is you I can draw something much bigger than the real thing, or I can draw something, I can make a ladder and make it tiny, or I can make a safety pin and make it gigantic. So because images allow that the objects have a size, but the images have a freedom that the objects don't have. And so in this exploration, eventually I have done work where you only see part of the object rather than the whole of the object. And that's interesting, too, because I don't even need to give you the whole object for you to know what they are. You can fill in the bit I haven't I haven't given you.
But it also allows the object to take on a scale that is larger than the format in which it's been presented. And so I really find this very interesting because, you know, if you go back to the boxes, the boxes were about trying to make overt the sense that the audience completes the object. If you have a box that somebody's supposed to open and close, you're doing exactly what you're not supposed to do with sculpture. You're not supposed to touch it.
But my boxes, if you didn't touch them, they don't work. And so I'm trying to say that in two-dimensional imagery, which we often think makes us passive, we're not being passive at all. The audience is very active in the creation of the thing that's understood, the thing that's seen.
I found that really fascinating, I think, because there's a kind of immediate engagement that you... seem to be thinking about with the audience and thinking about how the brain works in filling in the blanks. The other thing I think that's so interesting about these paintings that are fragments is that it's really kind of playing around with the idea of where the painting ends.
The object is, our brain has to finish the object of the coat hanger, but at the same time it's it's also kind of playing around with the idea of the finished of where the painting finishes and it may be it's it's past the canvas yes i love i love the idea that something extends into the space beyond and that uh so you can have uh you know if you go back to the one just before this back to this the the course yes you see i mean there's a it's a you Most of the object is not here. There's handles and there's the bit on the top. It's quite a large object.
And we have a tiny bit of it, but it's absolutely clear what it is. You know immediately what it's for. And you just fill in the bit that I don't give you. And its function is very, very clear. One of the things that's interesting about ordinary objects, all the things I draw are objects of use.
Nobody makes an object of use without there being a use. If there wasn't a use, people wouldn't make it. People designed a hammer in order to knock nails into it. People made corkscrews in order to get corks out. And the reason it takes the form it does, the material it does, is in order to perform that function.
There's a very important thing about why things look the way they do, why they're at the scale that they are. why they have the materiality that they do. All these questions come into this question of functionality, but also the images have functions. And I'm very interested in the idea that images are used in signage, that images are used in advertising, that images are used as we are now. You and I are looking at each other, we're thousands and thousands of miles apart, and we're together here through imagery.
It's imagery that's making us possible to be here together. It's really fascinating. Could we move to the next? Oh, great. So we're back in a way at the headphones again.
And we first looked at headphones in a painting. And now could you tell us a little bit more about the headphones here? Well, if we go right back, you know, we go back to the French trousers where I had the.
the metal drawing that was in Leave Hell From the Wall, I thought about trying to make sculptures of drawings for years. But of course, as drawings are flat, it's very difficult to figure out how to make them stand up. It's a very simple physical thing. How do you get them to support themselves?
And what I realized really, you know, about 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, was that If I buried the support under the ground, you could make a drawing appear to just stand on edge. So here we have the, this is a drawing in metal of the headphones and the support of the drawing has been set into the concrete floor. You don't see any support at all and it just appears to be floating there. But the thing that's important about it is, unlike most sculptures, imitate the form of the object being represented. This, if you, my, whereas my sculptures are, the way in which you read the image is entirely two-dimensional.
This is a pictorial way of reading. If you walk around the sculpture, it becomes a single line, one inch wide. It has no depth, these drawings. They are completely flat.
but you read it as three-dimensional because you read it as a two-dimensional image. I mean this is the same sculpture which was in the previous slide. In the previous slide it was in the neutrality of the gallery. Here we have it in Hong Kong in this elaborately complex space.
in the elaborately complex space where its transparency is very, very much more obvious, that you suddenly realize that all the movement going on behind it, all the way you move past it, it's constantly engaging with its environment. And it makes this engagement in a very unusual way because of its transparency. You've mentioned before about, in a way, about a two-dimensional object in a three-dimensional space. And is that what you're referring to here? Yes, I've tried to take, I've tried to turn a two-dimensional drawing into, in a sense, a three-dimensional object, a sculpture.
But it's not a sculpture of headphones, it's a sculpture of a drawing of a headphone. And I think it's the thing that makes them, obviously it makes them unusual, is that because of this dependence on two-dimensionality, whereas the obvious way to understand sculpture is to understand it in three-dimensional terms. Mine are minimally three-dimensional.
Can we go to the next? Right, so this is also in Hong Kong. I see as well.
So all of the sculptures here, or the sculptural drawings, they're all placed in the same space, is that correct? Yes, there's three drawings in Hong Kong. There's the high heel shoe, there's the headphones, and there's a light bulb. You can just see the light bulb at the top of the screen.
And you can also get a sense that if you kept moving around, it would become a single yellow line. And it's actually, I mean, it's quite fitting in a way that it's a high-heeled shoe, as this is one of the major shopping malls in Hong Kong. And so it's just quite an interesting context to have people shopping for high-heeled shoes and then looking down and seeing a kind of three-dimensional drawing of high-heeled shoes.
Yes, I never think of my work in terms of... advertising, I'm not trying to advertise shoes, but, and I'm not particularly interested in the idea which has been explored by many artists about the, you know, the commercial values of things and the question of the economics of these things. It's much more the literal, the simple object, the object. in a sense, contextless. Putting it into the shopping mall suddenly gives it a context.
And, of course, it takes a different context here. I've shown it before out in the countryside. You put this high heel in the countryside, now we have a different kind of story.
You don't have the shopping store, you've got a different kind of story. And so, just like the transparency allows them to absorb their surroundings, the nature of the surroundings also impacts how one understands the object one's looking at. Do we have the slide of the shoe in the countryside? We don't have it. Okay.
But it's, it's really, I think, what you're doing is really fascinating, because it really requires the participation of the audience in a way, and the audience's brain to think of the image in a particular way. And it's, and I think, when one thinks about going to the mall, and there's a particular shoe in one's brain that one wants to go and see, perhaps go and buy or not. It's, it's, it's again, playing around with the idea of images in one's brain and then how one can take, can look at a particular two-dimensional image and change kind of the feeling of that as well. Sorry, I don't think I'm making much sense there.
But I think it's very important too that, you see, what I was saying about how one understands a lot of things about images from, I give you a very simple image, but you understand all sorts of complex things about the object I've depicted. That's all to do with memory. And images work through memory.
The reason I give you things you can name. and I don't want you to speculate and think, what is this, is because I want to call upon your memory. And we don't realize how rich our memories are because it's so unconscious.
We don't look at a hammer and think, oh, this is what we're for. You don't have to. You just know.
And so, but the role of memory and how we understand the world is incredibly important. And without without our ability to store visual imagery in the way that we do in memory, we wouldn't be able to operate in the world as we do. And one of the things, you know, when I was a kid, we used to think that the vision worked by you looked at something and then the retina turned it upside down and the brain turned it right side up.
But the eyes were like a mirror of taking in the world. Well, today... scientists understand that vision works entirely different. It doesn't work like that at all.
We're only really seeing the part of the vision that we're focused on. And our brains, through memory, fill in all the peripheral vision. And that's why we're able to operate in the world.
If we had to take in everything, we'd all go nuts. We don't have to do that. We only have to focus on the thing we're focused on.
and then the brain does the rest. So it's a combination of sight and intellect, sight and intellect. Everything we do is to do with this combination.
And I think that we see this played out clearly through two-dimensional images. It mirrors what happens in normal sight. So just on that subject, we We have a couple of questions from the audience, particularly about your work in imagery. So I might maybe move there. We have a question.
Well, here's a question on color from Michael Chan. What was the inspiration behind the bright color schemes in your work? Well, essentially, for most of my career, to be honest, I was kind of frightened of color, and I couldn't figure out a way to, how could I properly use color? Because how do I find a reason for using one color in another? And it was when I realized that it didn't matter.
That was the thing that was the key, was it didn't matter if it was green or pink. If you're not trying to make it the natural color, it's one of the liberations of picture making that you're allowed to make it. The people who understand this perfectly, as everybody knows, are small children.
No small child ever picked up a purple crayon and drew a picture of a house and thought, I'm drawing a purple house. They don't think about that. They take the first thing at hand. and they're perfectly happy to make it purple or yellow or pink.
It doesn't make any difference. They use the things. Their instinct to it is so immediate.
They don't, they're not thinking about that. And very often, children often have a very strong reaction to what I do because they know that I'm quite close to what they do, how they are perceiving. Things are very simple.
I have these images and I color them in. That's what kids do. That was a question I had actually in the back of my mind, how children would view your work, just because it's often, it's this use of your... brain as an adult filling in what's there and so a children with lesser experience how one would approach your work I would I've I have a lot of fan mail from young children and I also I also hear a lot from teachers of young children who show my work to students to kids and the thing that they the teachers find useful is because it's not because I legitimize the sense of color, because kids already know that. But it's the thing of showing them that they can, encouraging to draw the things that are around them, the things that are familiar to them, that they don't have to look for something special.
They don't have to look for something that comes from another life or somebody else's world. The things directly, the thing in their hand, the things they... do use every day, all those things.
And the kids get that immediately. So I think on the subject of education, we have another question from the audience. In the late 1980s, goldsmiths played an important role in the development of the young British artists. What had changed in education, what has changed in education in more recent years to make universities less influential? So here's a presumption that universities are less influential.
Do you agree? Yes, well I'm not sure about influential. I think, I mean I can only speak for really my own experience.
My own experience of teaching was in Britain. It was through the 70s, from the 70s, you know from the 60s into the 90s. The period from the 60s to the early 90s in Britain was a picture, it was a time of incredible academic liberalism.
And as a teacher, you were given enormous respect and authority about what you did. I had a kind of academic freedom that nobody teaching today has. And so I was able to do exactly what I thought was best. And I was able, as I discovered new things, I was able to adjust my...
teaching practice to adapt to what it was that was happening. I was learning all the time from what I was seeing, what the students were doing. And what's happened in education since the 90s, and I think it's happened right across the world, is it's become more restrictive, it's more rule based, it's to do with things that are measurable.
Everything that's creative is resistant to these things. This is unfortunate, it is you know, it's, to me, it's kind of anti-creative because art is really, to me, art is really only at its most interesting when it's doing something that other things don't do. If you can do something without doing art, that's the proper way to do it.
Art is interesting because it's the area of human activity that... just like it can be functionless, it can be wayward, it can take chances, it can do all sorts of things because it's essentially observational towards the world. It's looking at what other people are doing, looking at what the world is like and filtering it through a kind of through a personal experience.
And this is seems to me that is very, very, you can't regulate that. And a lot of the way education has gone is that it's created regulation. The trouble is, as soon as you have regulations, instead of raising standards, you lower them.
And that kind of moves on into me wanting to ask you a little bit about the book you wrote entitled On Being an Artist. You've mentioned before in an interview that a lot of thoughts in the book came out of the desire to speak more clearly. clearly to students about art making. Do you think teaching has clarified or contributed to your own art practice? Sure, I think, you know, I found when I was teaching, you know, I think probably anybody teaching is thinking about who are my favorite teachers?
Who are the teachers who really helped me? What did I hate about my own education? What was useless?
What made me miserable? And you want to try to figure out how. I wanted to figure out how to be useful. And I wanted to figure out how to be able to say to students the kind of thing that I wanted somebody to say to me that I often didn't hear. I wanted a certain kind of advice.
I didn't want to be told what to do, but I wanted a certain kind. So my approach to teaching was to try to figure out how can you be useful here? And. I often found that in talking to students, I needed to listen to myself because very often what I was saying to them was something I needed to hear myself.
But I found it hard to address it directly to myself. But when I was telling them, if I listened in, I could turn it into something useful to me, too. I guess I'm thinking also a lot about liberation. And in a way.
it's kind of an overall theme how you talked about liberation of color and then in a way a liberation for students or artists to do what they want so liberation from rules liberation from structures in a way also we're almost out of time and maybe the last question I could ask you is perhaps about the artwork you have behind you because we've been looking at it this whole time I can't, it's a big painting behind me. And, you know, I didn't always like to live with my own work, but sometimes it's nice to have it around. And I have to say, to be honest, at my age, as I get older, I find I'm more interested in what I do than what anybody else does. And, you know, there was all those years of teaching gave me an interest in lots of other people's work. I don't do that so much anymore.
Many thanks to everyone for joining us today. And for those of those of you who submitted questions and huge thanks again, Michael, for giving up your time on Saturday. And I wish you all a wonderful rest of the weekend. Do you have any parting words you wanted to say at all, Michael? Just to thank everybody who's listening.
And I hope that it's been entertaining. Thank you very much for our conversation. And I hope it's been enjoyable for other people.
Thank you again. Enjoy the rest of the weekend, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Bye.