Andrew Salgado reads two or three books at a time. He starts with Baudelaire when searching for imagery, follows it with Derek Jarman's account of building a garden while dying of HIV, and finishes with Susan Orlean on obsession and the pursuit of beauty. Then he goes into the studio and starts a painting that may take a year, beginning with a title jotted in a notebook. He is also one of the UK's leading figurative painters, with fifteen sold-out solo exhibitions and a piece at Phillips New York that sold for five times its estimate. He is equally vocal about all of this.