Jonathan Yeo on his infamous George W Bush portrait

My parents encouraged me to be creative. My mum had wanted to pursue music and hadn’t been allowed to by her parents, so I think she gave me more latitude than I would have had otherwise. People look back now as if it was always inevitable that I would go and do the things I did but I needed that early encouragement from my parents.

My first portrait subject was my mum. My parents kept my art on the walls when I was young, and one was a drawing of my mum in felt tip. It really bothered me at the time because I made a mistake and couldn’t fix it.

I used to draw my teachers at school during class. I had ADHD, which was diagnosed many years later when I was about 40, and I founded it much easier to pay attention to what was going on in a class if I was drawing. Some teachers told me off for it but some would allow me to do it, and I would do better in those subjects.

My grandmother had a little local art gallery in Greenwich, and I used to go in to see how the local artists worked in their studios. It was an insight into how people were actually doing it.

I grew up surrounded by politics [Jonathan's dad is politician Tim Yeo]. Growing up with political discussions around the dinner table and real politicians coming to the house, seeing how they were in private wasn’t necessarily what you saw on TV, I think that got me interested in painting political subjects later. I didn’t really set out to paint political figures, but I wasn’t fazed by them when I got the commissions. 

I didn’t go to art school. I taught myself how to paint by trying things and getting them wrong, and learning and copying other artists’ work. We used to live near the Tate Britain so I was able to go in there on the way to school and look at one artist at a time and figure out how they were doing it. There was a lot of experimentation and then combining elements of things you’d learn from one with something you’d learn from another.

I had cancer in my early twenties. It wasn’t fun but in retrospect it was also a quirk of time in that it was a time in my life where I was trying to decide what to do. Most people would try to talk me out of art because they see that as a difficult way to make a living, but when you’re ill people don’t want to give you bad news, so suddenly I was able to spend my twenties painting portraits.

Portraits were seen as very old fashioned when I was starting out in the 1990s. Everyone was doing conceptual art and video art. In a funny way it meant that people remembered who you were. Hardly anyone else was trying to do portraits, other than a few in a neoclassical sort of retro way. So there wasn’t actually a lot of competition. That’s what you need early on, to be noticed and remembered—although preferably not being remembered for being terrible!

My first commission was when I was having my cancer treatment. It was of Trevor Huddleston, who was the archbishop by then and had been a big campaigner in the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa. It was commissioned by the anti-Apartheid movement and he asked me to do it, mostly out of sympathy I think, because I was ill and he knew I was trying to be an artist. Nothing in my track record at that point, other than a few slightly wonky pictures of family members, would have given him any reassurance!

That was really interesting because I started it and I was feeling a bit under pressure. I was trying to do a portrait as I thought it should be done, and it was going badly. A friend of mine, who didn’t do art school, came around to see me and said, “Hey, you know, you’re just not having any fun with that. Put that one aside, and start another one and have fun with it. Then go back to that one once you’ve done that and maybe you’ll know how to fix it.” And sure enough, it worked! If you’re enjoying something and not just trying to follow a template of how you think it should be done, the end result is usually better. That was a kind of pivotal experience. And then I got a trickle of commissions off the back of it so I was able to keep going.

I was commissioned as the official election artist of 2001. That was basically invented by Tony Banks, who was running the House of Commons art collection at the time, and Philip Mould, who is a great portrait expert. Tony Blair had been Prime Minister for several years and was refusing to sit for a portrait—he hadn’t sat for the National Portrait Gallery, he hadn’t sat for the House of Commons—so they came up with the idea for there to be an election artist. It was a slightly bonkers five or six weeks of following around each of the three leaders. I got to see the Blair operation, which was very tight, and it was a fight to get them to let me see him on any given day. And then there was William Hague, who was more relaxed, and Charles Kennedy, who was very sweet. That experience of the sort of diplomacy involved in getting something done was fascinating. I wasn’t totally happy with the results, as I ended up doing these drawings on the fly and then trying to construct something in the studio afterwards. But it was a formative experience and fun to look back on!

I wasn’t that nervous doing portraits of the Royal Family. With some subjects, you’re very aware of who they are before you start, whether it’s a Hollywood actor, a musician, whoever. It’s important to try and erase as much as you can your preconceptions of them. There’s a public image in your mind, but people almost always turn out to be something different. 

I was surprised how nice Dennis Hopper was. I shouldn’t have been because obviously he’s a good actor, but it’s a surprise when actors who are known for playing baddies turn out to be nice cuddly people! Of course there are other people like Jamie Oliver for example who is exactly how you expect him to be, he really is that kind, generous-spirited person you’ve seen. 

My George W Bush portrait was a bit of an experiment. I had been thinking for a while about doing something in a broken up, fragmented style, and I wanted to try a collage. Pornography seemed like a logical source material, because you’ve got all these skin tones. I couldn’t do it to one of my actual sitters, because it would be seen as an insult! Then this thing came along where they approached me to do a portrait for the presidential library. They asked for some sketches and then they just kind of dropped it, they didn’t really give me a reason why. So I was thinking I could do it as a collage, and if it turned out well and I could disguise it well enough, I’d send it over and maybe they’d put it up on the wall. So I tried it out. It looked quite believable and I thought they probably wouldn’t notice because the use of porn was quite subtle in the end. It was at the beginning of that period of things going viral, and Lazarides, who were doing all the Banksy stuff at the time, unveiled it and then it went everywhere. So I lost the opportunity to find out if we could sneak it into the presidential library!

I think technology can be a great tool for creating art, but it can’t replace humans. AI is basically a remix engine. It’s interesting but it doesn’t come close to doing the things that you can do. What it can do in an interesting way is a quick preview of different ideas for remixing things. It comes up with lots of different ideas very quickly. I think the danger is that it becomes easy to visualise all kinds of possibilities quickly and people might lose their ability to imagine things and take risks. I don’t think AI robots are going to take over the world any time soon, but I think it could make us risk averse. I do think we’ll see a lot of interesting 3D art in the next decade or so, especially in the world of architecture.

I’ve known my wife since we were kids. We’ve been together since we were about 24, so it’s been quite a while! We’ve got two daughters, and they sit for me sometimes. It’s lovely seeing how they’re both creative in different ways. The younger one is very talented at art and the old one is into design and invention. Sometimes they come to me for art advice—but then they don’t often take it! I went to the parents’ evening the other day where the teachers all said how well my younger daughter was doing, and I realised that was an experience my parents never had. I was badly behaved at school and incapable of sticking with anything, I only enjoyed art. It’s amazing to see how your kids can turn out to be so different, a better version of yourself really.