Julian Opie talks about his works and recent exhibition.

The focus of this exhibition is around a dancer called Caterina, she is a ballet dancer from London. I took her to the studio and videoed her going through a particular dance in six or seven different costumes. For this costume I asked her to wear a necklace and go through her dance. I took individual frames from this movie to try to draw the most dramatic moment, and a moment that would describe a rectangle. Then I produced this piece by using my computer to draw over the stills and built it physically using computer-cut vinyl, and placed her within the rectangle – like a traditional painting, which is then hung on a wall.

I think when one sees people, you don’t see them in photographic detail. If I think of the cameraman behind you or the person I can see moving in the office, I see them not as a blur exactly, but as limited information. Out on the street you don’t take in the details of everybody’s skin, but you might notice that they have long hair or glasses or that they carry a bag or they walk fast. It’s this kind of discussion of how we really see reality that interests me more than what you would expect to see, which would be a full photographic image. You would have to look carefully and slowly at each part of the body. I want you to take this in quite quickly, and concentrate on the speed and the movement and the colour and the drama and the position. If I were to put her face in, your eye would be drawn only to her face.

A previous interviewer asked if I danced myself, and I don’t know how to dance so perhaps for that, I’m all the more impressed by people who are very flexible. But I guess, in this project, I’m interested in pushing the idea of a body and positions, and the space that a body can take up, to some kind of extreme. I think a ballet dancer is someone who pushes the possibilities of the human body to its extremes. I like the idea of combining that with fairly normal clothing. She’s not wearing a ballet dancer’s outfit, she's wearing high heels and perhaps street wear. So there’s a contrast between what you expect, a fairly polite physical position in those clothes, and this almost over-dramatic position that her body is in.

When I begin a project, I have only a vague idea of what it is that I want, only a few clues. So I start with the most obvious, and the most obvious was to use my family, the next door neighbour, anybody who came to the studio, it didn’t really matter. I just needed human beings. There was no reason to be more specific than that. And I found myself on the underground looking at the people opposite me on the train thinking, ‘each one of these people has an amazing story, they are all specific’. They’ve made all these decisions about their clothes and their hair, about their earrings and their glasses. Each would make a fantastic portrait of a particular kind of person. But I’m too shy to ask the people on the underground. I began to find that people asked me to do their portraits. This seemed interesting because there is a tradition of commissioned portraits, which I could relate to. I’ve referred to that tradition in the way that I paint. And bit-by-bit over the years that I’ve been drawing people, I’ve become clearer about what it is that I want from people, so I’m more specific about who I choose.

Now if I do a commission, I ask people to send me a photograph and then I decide whether they would be useful for one project or another project. For instance, there's a picture of a person called Clare here who works in my gallery – the reason I chose her was because she looks a little like a Titian painting; she’s rather round and she has blonde straight hair. The reason I chose her was because of the way she looked. So my reasons for choosing people have changed over the years. When I draw in a more manga, anime inspired style, this really requires young people. I haven’t yet tried that, I admit, but my instinct is that this is a way that’s useful to draw young people, so I focused on finding young people. My kids are a good place to start, but I’m also looking around for other possibilities.  I recently drew some of my daughter’s friends as well, because they’re teenagers and this kind of teenage look seems to connect with the style of drawing. Whereas, the 18th century style that I’ve been using isn’t a teenage style in particular; it can function for various types of people. It’s quite good for wealthy collectors who might want their portrait done, because often they have the right kind of clothes and the right kind of attitude to connect to this particular history of portraiture.

People talk about the eyes being the window to the soul and then express surprise that I only use a simple black circle. If you press “apple + L” on the programme that I use you get a tool that draws circles and you can hold down “shift” and it draws a perfect circle instead of an oval. So I always start with the eye. I go in there with “apple + L” and draw a circle which is exactly over the iris of the eye. In the beginning, this seemed like enough to start a language for the face: two lines for the mouth, two dots for the nostrils, two lines for the eyebrows. It was this very rigid language that I wanted to use to draw everybody. As if there was a graphic designer whose job it was to make a logo for every human being on the earth. That would be my imaginary job for a while. Therefore it was necessary that the language was cut short, that it was a very minimal, simple language to cover all eventualities. As the years have gone by, I’ve slowly introduced new elements: a little bit of shine for the eye, for example.

I’ve looked to other people to teach me what else might be possible while retaining that universality of a language that will do for everybody. When I look at the people gathered for the press conference, effectively, if you were a cow, you would say, “they all look the same”. We all are the same. Maybe there’s a difference between men and women, which cuts us a little in half, but generally there’s a bunch of humans that look the same. But then you start to look more closely and you can make as many differences as you like. We lie somewhere in between these two realities. We’re all the same, but we all make many decisions about ourselves and we are also born with differences. I’m trying to find a language that is simple, which reflects this sameness. We all effectively have the same eyes, but at the same time there are subtle differences that give an individuality that brings the portrait to life. I’ve found that by keeping the eyes fairly simple, it allows the viewer to look at the rest of the picture, for your eye to wander around it. When you give little information, your brain fills the rest in. It’s interesting, if I don’t draw the skin; your brain immediately fills the curves of the skin in. So actually the less you put in, the more realistic you can be.