but also not entirely agreeing with each other, which is what it's about. It's about challenging each other. She was totally fine with me to keep doing it, she'd just pull me up every time I did and say stuff like that, "stop experimenting". You've started a series of portraits on Kylie [Ben's wife, pictured left]. Is that a concession to Margaret? No, that's a concession to Kylie. In one show I had last year called Inhabit , that was a very dark show, very dark, and it was a very hard year for me for a number of reasons, personal reasons and stuff, and she [Kylie] said then "you live with these paintings, you're in the studio all day every day, with these works, sort of growing, but growing on such a dark tangent. You need to make something beautiful". And it was a good point. It's the same as what Margaret said. As a contemporary artist why can't I make something that's beautiful and it be just as important as something that's rigorously negative? And part of me thinks that that's a Catholic upbringing. I went to a Catholic high school, and the idea of guilt, maybe it's something to do with that, or entrenched Catholic Irish guilt from generations ago in Ireland, that I feel like as an artist that I have a responsibility to do more than just be covered in paint but to actually make comments about things that I feel. And I feel strongly