I have been influenced, as much as anyone, by the Indian artist Bhupen Kharkar, who was resident in the next studio to mine at Bath Academy of Art in 1979.

But I did not know who he was at that time and never spoke to him, although I did once sneak into his studio when he wasn't there and saw what to me were the strangest pictures I'd ever seen, some even painted on glass.

It was only later in 1996 that I first talked to him in New Delhi. I was having a show at The British Council and he was having a show at The National Museum of Modern Art. I took a rickshaw miles out of town to where he was staying at an artist's retreat. He was drawing in brown chalk on a huge piece of paper pinned to the wall. What a love of India he has, and what a sense of humour. He is also the first modern gay Indian artist to have come out in public.