‘I have taken risks, but Damien is a staggering risk-taker’: Michael Craig-Martin on style, the YBAs and being the great late bloomer of British art

Artist Michael Craig-Martin photographed at the Royal Academy, London for the Observer New Review by Suki Dhanda. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/the Observer

In 1961, aged 20, Michael Craig-Martin enrolled at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture and immediately found himself all at sea.

“Back then,” he recalls, “abstract expressionism was still lingering and painting was painterly. The first thing I realised was that I was the only person on the course who really couldn’t do it. I was just not given to that kind of painting. I remember thinking, ‘That’s it. It’s all over for me.’”