Ben Luke

is not nostalgic but maybe lost somewhere in the past that the idea of somebody being born now would not really encounter white noise in the way that you did when you were growing up and i did when i was growing you know there was a point where tv stopped yeah and you know that's right there's a powerful sense in that about a memory but obviously also it presents this kind of visual opportunity yeah absolutely and it's very poetic that's a very poetic sensibility it seems to me

And it's amazing Potter has a sort of currency now, which is really amazing because there are people like Ed Atkins who are making works in response to Dennis Potter and Henry Lloyd and others.

You know, I'm really conscious that I'm of a generation who was a child when Dennis Potter's plays were on television.

And so Blue Remembered Hills was on television when I was a kid.

Yeah.

And Singing Detective was on the television when I was a kid.

And I was deeply disturbed by the presence of these images, you know.

And I don't think I was mature enough to respond to them, you know, in terms of their meaning and to describe what those images were doing and what the kind of themes of the work were.

But they marked me, you know.

I know that they are part of my body.

Does it affect your painting?

If you listen to Shostakovich, how does it affect your painting?

It's interesting you refer to Brian Eno there because I know that there's a wonderful painting of yours called Arena.

And I know that that seems to be partly sort of childhood memory informed because of the BBC TV series called Arena, which was an arts programme, a wonderful arts programme.

Is that right?

Was it informed by that?

It's a sequence of a kind of bottle.

You've already talked about Dennis Potter, but what other media influenced your work?

Don't Look Now, Performance, yeah.

Again, like so disturbing when you, I mean, changing your brain kind of movie as well.