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Mr. Hirst started the spot series in 1986. “At the time I was doing sort of collages that were a bit like Nicholas de Staël or Hans Hoffmann paintings and I was resolving a lot of formal problems with color,” he said. “What made me keep doing them is they always looked great. The idea was that it was an endless series. It’s a conceptual idea rather than reality.”
The earliest spot paintings were done directly on the wall, he added, “so they looked like a giant machine had painted them.”
“I was sort of trying to deny that there was an artist, so there was this kind of infinitely happy paintings,” Mr. Hirst said. But over the years his idea has gone through many transformations. He went through a phase where he wanted to make sure the viewer would know the paintings were man-made.

-New York Times
December 12 2011