Chris O'Doherty (Reg Mombassa)

Chris O'Doherty: I loved drawing from as far back as I can remember until … from the age of three or something I was always just filling up butcher’s pads full of drawings that my mother used to buy me butcher’s paper very cheap, so the crappy paper.

And I grew up in New Zealand. I wasn’t much good at football or street fighting, and I wasn’t academically that great, and I had no … nothing else I wanted to do, so that’s really … I always thought I’d do something artistic.

To me it’s been the greatest thing to be able to actually be an artist and earn a living at doing something that children and monkeys do for free. Art is essential for a reasonably healthy society. I mean, it’d be very dull without it.

I’m profoundly afraid of humans, particularly males, and because they’re so irrational and violent, and so, you know, doing pictures or songs about what you fear is a good way of controlling it, or dealing with it, or making it funnier or lightening it or making sense of it, I guess.

You know, the intention of the artist is … or what they think it is is often not the way people appreciate it. And that’s fine. It doesn’t matter if someone sees an entirely different meaning in it as long as they get something from it. And it’s all valid. You don’t have to think what the artist thinks, so … they’re often idiots and wankers anyway, and who wants to know what … who cares what they think?

You know, people say that art, you can’t compare it or judge it; it’s not like sport. But it is. It’s totally like sport. It’s a … it’s just a contest, you know. Life is a contest and bitter. It’s a bitter, fruitless contest, and it’s short periods of ultra violence.