He's one Britain's greatest living painters along with Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Leon Kossoff is eighty years old and though his paintings hang in galleries all over the world, in many ways he is hardly known.

Leon Kossoff, From Rembrandt: The Blinding of Samson
Private Collection
© Leon Kossoff

He has never given an interview, never appeared on camera. When his current show was being prepared for the national gallery, they wanted to make a video about him - he would only allow them to film his hands.

But suddenly last Friday Kossoff relented and allowed me and our arts correspondent Nicholas Glass to go on a journey with him round his new show.

It proved to be one of the most uplifting mornings I have known as a journalist. He was in the most sparkling form from the very moment we met at the café at 8am. We talked as if we had known each other for ever.

I knew well his idiosyncratic views about interviews, and it was clear that in formal terms he would not do one, yet it was also clear that he really WANTED to do SOMETHING. And as we wandered - with the camera rolling - around the show and thence to some of the subject pictures, it just began to cascade from his mind - lyical insights into how and why he draws and paints.

Leon Kossoff, From Poussin: The Destruction and the Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem
Private Collection
© Leon Kossoff

Utterly and completely breath-taking. The most brilliant subject and the most wonderful pictures around which to talk. Frankly we got enough to make a documentary about him; it's an amazing insight into art, into space, into life.

We'll put it all on the web, it's a terrific watch. Strange really, to find yourself doing something all these arts correspondents have been trying to do for years. Kossoff said to me, 'they come with an agenda... Idon't want that'.

My only agenda was to get him to talk, and he did. About growing up in Shoreditch - his parents had emigrated from the ukraine in 1904, his father was a baker. There were no pictures in the house, no art in the family. He just found himself at ten on the steps of the national gallery, went in and it changed his life. He's been going in there to draw and paint ever since.

Watch the report here.