'Everything I ever worked on is coming together now'

Conceptual artist, painter, mentor to the YBAs, overnight success at 55. On the eve of a Royal Academy retrospective show, Mark Hudson interviews Michael Craig-Martin

- Mark Hudson

Michael Craig-Martin looks out from his 21st-storey apartment in the Barbican, the immense London sprawl spread out before him. The urbane Irish-American artist has played many roles since arriving here in 1966: pranksterish conceptual artist in the Seventies, guru to the YBA generation in the Eighties, and creator, more recently, of a kind of digital-age still life painting in eye-popping colour.

Yet it’s only now that he’s getting his due as one of the handful of living artists to have been accorded the honour of a retrospective exhibition in the Royal Academy’s palatial main galleries. Does he feel he’s finally got the British capital at his feet – in all senses?

“I’m 83 tomorrow,” he says in a tone of wonder. “And it’s as though everything I’ve ever worked on or thought about is coming together now.”

For all his presence on the London art scene over nearly half a century, from youthful interloper to distinguished elder statesman – a Royal Academician indeed – Craig-Martin was a late developer in terms of creating an immediately identifiable style. Indeed, he didn’t even start making the paintings for which he is best known until the mid-Nineties, when he was well into his fifties.

“Most artists have their career high point early or in mid-career, and when they have a big retrospective it’s giving recognition to work produced over a long period,” he says. “So it’s interesting to me that my career high is coming now, with an exhibition of work mostly produced very recently, if not right now.”

There are interviews that feel daunting because the subject has a reputation for being surly, incoherent or simply shy. But on the evidence of Craig-Martin’s formidably articulate autobiographycum-how to book On Being an Artist, the more unnerving certainty is that there is likely no question to which he won’t have a clearly thought out and long practised answer.