Joan Mitchell was a big influence on me as an art student. Why? Because she was the first to do crazy things with paint—to really do things with it, to make it move and sing and shout.

You could sit with a Jenny Saville for the rest of your life and still be surprised by what she has done with the paint. She's constantly pushing boundaries, challenging our perceptions of what painting is today and its relevance in our image-saturated world.

Fiona Rae puts ideas of abstraction to the test and wins every time. Her work taught me that intuitive painting doesn't mean uncontrolled painting; it means being so in tune with your process that every mark, however spontaneous it appears, is exactly right.

I was taught by Ian during my Master's degree—the sweetest, most brilliant painter. His work explores landscapes and our relationship with them, how we see space and the land around us. Ian was a landscape artist in the 80s, and his abstract work grew from that deep connection to place.

Tàpies showed me that paint doesn't have to be just paint. By introducing materials like marble dust and sand, he created surfaces that felt ancient, weathered, tactile—surfaces that carried their own history.