Nigel Cooke

I've come to accept that anxiety is the only appropriate feeling for a contemporary figure painting, says Nigel Cooke.

My grandfather was an amateur painter and I inherited his easel and paints when he died. I was 14, but I wasn't studying art at school; I had no interest in painting whatsoever. Some months later, despite my indifference, I decided I owed it to my grandfather to give it a go. The results were disastrous - the gulf between what I had seen in my head (a dramatic landscape) and what I ended up picturing on the canvas (a couple of black baguettes misaligned in a blue void) was just so great.

The fact that it was insurmountably, brain-achingly difficult stunned me. I remember well the feeling of near panic and perhaps humiliation when it dawned on me that this simply couldn't be done. I suppose I became fascinated with why it was so hard, and why I hadn't foreseen that it would be. In a lot of ways it's still like that now. It still feels like an impossible challenge. But that's really what's so lovable and strange about painting, and why I got hooked in the first place.

It's unfashionable to admit this, but I've accepted that I try to use colour emotively. There are certain colours - usually very high, infantile ones - that carry a kind of psychic build-up for me, and they keep recurring in my images. For me, emotive colours electrify pictures with difficult feelings.

My paintings have to be a bit nasty colour-wise to have any bite at all, and I've come to accept that anxiety is the only appropriate feeling for a contemporary figure painting. But it's also because I'm more attracted to bad or desperate images - they communicate more ambivalence and doubt and conflict than very polished pictures.

• Nigel Cooke was born in Manchester in 1973. He is represented by Modern Art, London and Andrea Rosen, New York

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