The father of Britart

He has been working on a series of paintings that refers directly back to old masters. I wonder whether there are echoes of the Chapman brothers' manhandling of Goya.

"The paintings treat the old masters in the same way as the shoe, table or chair," he says. Reworking Piero della Francesca's Flagellation and Georges Seurat's Bathers he observes that "one of the characteristics of both paintings is their sense of being very still.

We have Seurat's drawings and can see from them that each of the figures is prepared separately. The scene never occurred. It's a construct that produces a slightly uneasy scene. This is exactly what happens in my work."

Piero's painting "is supposedly about the great tragedy in the background; the minor figures are in the foreground, and each figure is not aware of the other's presence". Craig-Martin deconstructs the scene still further, so that one image features only landscape, and, in another, the figures are displaced from that background.

"People often assume they are being transported into the past when they are looking at a painting like this. Actually, it's the opposite. The painting comes into our present. Each generation finds a way of making it come alive."

I remember quizzing him some 15 years ago, when I began working with art students, on his teaching technique. His response has been my model ever since. He suggested that a teacher could instruct a student to be exactly like himself, but not quite as good, or he could give the students sufficient space and confidence to affirm what they knew that the tutor did not.

There are things that younger artists could do and see that an older generation would overlook. Old School teaching would have the student make a work, and then encourage something new and different developed from it.

Those taught by Craig-Martin recall that he would encourage them to make the same work again and again, until they understood why they had made it in the first place.

It was an approach that launched a hundred careers, among them Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume. Craig-Martin claims no credit for their success, but his role extended beyond the art school, generating the gallery support that created a movement.

He knew something special was emerging. "I always had one or two great students, but at the end of the Eighties there were 10, 15, 20 - every year." As to whether the YBA movement will survive middle age, he says only that "the hardest period is in the following decade after initial success. You have to be lost a little in order to be found again."

On his most famous student, Damien Hirst, he is firm but diplomatic, not to say enigmatic: "I do think Damien is a very significant artist. His importance is exaggerated by some, but under-represented by others."

Massive recognition provided those artists with unprecedented freedom and ambition. "They were given extraordinary opportunities. They have no experience of there not being a place for their work." He sees London now as being as significant as Paris at the turn of the last century or New York in the Fifties.

The most important art, he says, happens when artists group together. "All the great artists of the Renaissance knew each other. This is why such great heights were reached - there were so many people touching each other. Today, you see the huge number of artists in London. It means the discourse is here."

His days of talent-spotting may be over, but Craig-Martin is happy to observe an art world changed beyond recognition. "Today, art has gone from a very small area of interest to having a place in the ongoing culture of the time. Now people go to Tate Modern, or they go to a movie."