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Jools Holland: There is one of your paintings in our studio,
and all the musicians who come, look at it.
And the ones who have come back again: you'll often find them looking at it and looking
at it again, because you can just keep returning to them
and finding something else in them.
Which I think is also true of great pieces of music;
you can come back to them years later and the good ones, they really were good,
they were even better than I thought; and there are other ones when you think 'well,
actually I've moved away from that now'. But I think it's that thing of when you first
see something, or when you first hear a piece of music,
you can be drawn to it. Sometimes you have to look further and further
but it's that initial response of 'Oh, that's great, that sounds great, that
looks great, I've got to look at it more and more.'
And I think this painting has that, it's very exciting.
I think that anyone who sees this, if you see it across a room, they draw you
in, so you're drawn towards them.
It's almost like the transitory atmosphere of landscape
is in these - of a cityscape - which changes as the light changes, as the weather changes.
You've managed to capture a moment, which couldn't be captured in a photograph
- it couldn't be captured in a film somehow.
You've captured it, you know. To write a song or to do music
you have to go over the same thing again a few times,
because you're mystified or you love it, or you're trying to figure it out,
and I think that's the same with painters. I think you can see that when they first start,
they're trying to figure it out. And to do the simplest thing
but to get it just right is the other thing that I think musicians and painters have.
Some things infuriate them; somebody will hear something and say,
'Well, that sounds great what you did there', or 'that painting looks great'
but the person that's made it thinks 'No, that's not quite right!'
And it's that determination to get that right and
the fact that you can never quite figure it out that that's what's great.
You know, Keith Richards said to me once, 'When I play I thought I was sounding like
Chuck Berry, but I don't' But the fact that he sounds like him[self]
is what we all love. And I think that in painting, nobody else
will make a painting that looks like your paintings.
It's very interesting that your paintings should be next to the Canalettos
because I think they do have a very strong atmosphere,
and they are also London in a different time. Curiously enough they withstand the tests
of time because you can still look at them and see
more and more in them. On the other hand, I think that comparisons
are bad because you can never really compare anything with anything.
Of course Canaletto didn't have to have to deal
with anything like surfaces like chrome or vehicles or electric lights.
Also, his people were very small, weren't they?