There was so much more to look forward to when making a painting, and so many more ways to entice the eye than mere copying. 'Of course, it turned out that painting was not so dead after all and I became bored with the limits of photorealism soon after this painting dried. I also heightened the colours to add to the paintings putrefied sensibility. I took some time working out where to crop the image to achieve a slightly awkward, unbalanced feel. 'With this merciless conceptual form of painting there was little need for sketches. Physical and mental decline following a fall is a fear that becomes increasingly present as we age.

Relating the life of a whole empire to that of one individual is an absurdity meant to highlight one’s existentialist isolation. 'My title Decline and Fall obviously refers to Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88). First painted, then photographed, then printed in a book, then painted again, and now, no doubt, photographed and printed once again in the pages of this book.

has been buried by successive layers of representation. I wanted the figure to breathe down the back of your neck, to be – although not exactly alive – always present. I had made similar paintings that were more abstract but – without the notion that a real living and breathing figure had once existed and been immortalized in paint – the idea of representing death seemed less close. 'It was important to me that the painting was figurative. My slowly painted detail encapsulates the flesh of the figure like a painstaking autopsy. Auerbach’s paintings seemed to have a ready atmosphere of the graveyard. If painting was, in fact, dead then what better place for a young artist brought up on the isolated flatlands of Norfolk with a liking for gothic horror to be than in its morgue? Pulling out books from a library shelf was like pulling out the recorded lives of the irrelevant, the ignored and the deceased. I – like many fellow artists – had been impressed by the ways in which Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter’s painted pop had hit photography head-on. The overriding mood of the 1990s was that ‘painting is dead’ conceptual art and photography had killed it. (Juliet Yardley Mills, who the artist painted over 70 times), but in my work, Auerbach’s thick impasto brush-marks are rendered perfectly flat and photorealist.

'Like a number of my paintings in the 1990s, Decline and Fall (1995) is based on a detail of a painting by Frank Auerbach of J.Y.M.

Glenn brown rembrandt