Ben Eastham interviews painter Luc Tuymans.

Eastham writes: "Tuymans describes an approach defined by the artist’s decision to take inspiration from the world around him and his place in it. This is ‘a realism born of necessity. This country has been overrun by so many foreign powers that we don’t have time to be Romantic.’ … Tuymans ‘decided very early on not to make art from art’. Rather than join with, or react against, prevailing movements in the practice and theorisation of contemporary art he sought instead to engage with the world as he perceived it, and the impulse remains ‘to start from something real’."