Damien Hirst, the once hard-drinking, hard-partying, brash, loud-mouthed enfant terrible of art, admitted he was a changed man as he unveiled an exhibition that represents a sea change in his work. Over two years he stood alone in a studio and painted. He is, he said, a man confronting his mortality.

Hirst has chosen one of the grandest galleries in the UK to exhibit 25 works that took up a big chunk of his life between 2006 and 2008. From tomorrow visitors to the Wallace Collection in London – with its arms and armour, walls covered with Old Masters including Poussin, Titian and Velázquez, and its lunching ladies – will also be able to see the artist's Francis Bacon-influenced Blue Paintings hung over two rooms.

He becomes one of only a handful of painters who have had work exhibited at the Wallace Collection in their lifetime, including Lucian Freud in 2004. Hirst paid £250,000 to make the show possible, with gilding on the ceiling, a refurbished, lighter floor and £60,000 of blue silk wallpaper, commissioned from Prelle of Lyon (Marie Antoinette's silk manufacturer of choice).

Today Hirst said he was an impatient man learning to be patient.

He said: "The paintings are about my mortality, whereas all the other stuff was about my immortality. I mean I definitely believed I was going to live forever, for a while, back there."

Hirst, the most successful of the Young British Artists, was known for his partying. "We had a brilliant time but you've got to get off the table and stop shouting 'yeahhh'. When you're drunk as a young person, you look cool but when you're old you think 'fuck off.' It's just not attractive when you're older."

Hirst admitted that for a long time he had been afraid of painting, even though he admired painters more than other artists. "I was always very dissatisfied with my paintings, I always thought they weren't very good. It was a big uphill struggle. But I suddenly thought, after everything I've been through, there was nothing to be afraid of."

Hirst's new paintings feature the artist's familiar themes and motifs – skulls, spots, sharks and butterflies – but it took a long time to get to where he wanted. "I did two years of absolutely rotten paintings and I wouldn't want anybody to see them. They were just awful.

"For two years when I was painting them I thought, fucking hell, if I die now they're going to come in here and go, 'Oh, he fucked it up at the end. He was brilliant up to that point and then he did these and they're awful.' I was painting skulls and I couldn't paint them properly so I put a fag in their mouth and a red jacket and it was like 'Death having a fag'. And then I started painting the smoke and they were just awful. And then I told myself, just go back to the skull."

Hirst had a large team to help produce some of his best known works – the animals in formaldehyde, the spot paintings, the diamond-encrusted skull – but these paintings were produced alone in a studio at Claridge's hotel.

"Someone said to me recently, after seeing me in the studio covered in paint, 'Are you really making these yourself?' It's funny that that is shocking as well. For me to do paintings is more shocking than formaldehyde."

Hirst may have rediscovered painting but that does not mean he is going to spend the rest of his career with oils. "I'm doing other types of work. Something has definitely changed but I'm not saying I'm just going to paint like this."

Projects include painting from photographs, and sculptures which look as though they have been found in the sea.

Hirst, 44, lives in Devon but is also restoring a country house, Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire, with a view to it becoming a family home and gallery.

Tracey Emin recently said she was considering leaving Britain and living in France because "I'm simply not willing to pay tax at 50%". Hirst, one of the world's richest artists, is more sanguine. "I like living here. If you live somewhere nice you've got to pay the taxes, haven't you? Unfortunately. But I will moan at the telly, like Victor Meldrew."

Here are some of my favourite logos

Identity research

These are some of the images i used when creating my identities.

I found this on the internet that i thought would be quite useful

Influenced by early 20th century avant-garde design, American album covers and the work of Russian constructivists El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko, Brody began exploring new directions for graphic design in 1981 as art director for “The Face.” For this brash lifestyle magazine with its roots in the punk movement, Brody used noisy graphics and challenged conventional thinking about the form and function of typography by distorting letterforms, mixing fonts and making generous use of icons.

With the first Macs, Brody began to set new precedents in both design and typography. With the Macs, he told “Print: American Graphic Design Magazine” in 1999, he had the “opportunity to democratize the fiefdom of typographic design. Finally, we could…explore ideas that challenged our fundamental notions of what typographic language should be.”

Brody began to design his own typefaces — Insigina, Arcadia and Typeface Six are three of his most popular. They, and others, appear on everything from advertising to album and magazine covers, fashion magazine spreads and covers for rock biographies. “Blur is probably one of my favorite typefaces,” Brody says, “because it has to do with our experience in the information society today that I managed to translate into a process font. It was in the right place at the right time and became very popular, because it expressed an idea successfully and people understood the idea.”

One Mac, Any Medium

“The single major difference the Mac has made,” Brody observes “is that, from one source, we can create a language that can be used in any medium. We’ll produce a core identity and language that can then be distributed in print, web, electronic environmental design, packaging — everything — from one computer. The Mac is a means of broadcasting via the web. Via pdfs, we might send files to a printer in Japan. Of course, it’s a receiver as well. I often listen to the radio, a live stream on broadband.

“The Mac has also allowed us to work as one network,” Brody adds, “with different skill sets in different studios. The facility in Paris is largely geared toward packaging. London does most of the branding, and ‘Fuse’ comes out of London. And the San Francisco office is almost all motion graphics for film, TV and web. So we can have different skill sets in different places, and projects are often shared between two or more studios. We can not only share ideas, but we can have idea contributions from people working in very different kinds of cultures. Our process is to try and use the computer in a very human, organic way, so that there’s a lot of sharing of culture as well as the practical stuff.

“And the Mac means we can work economically, which is amazing. We don’t have to have 20 people in one place. It’s enabled us to have an extremely modular setup.”