All Photographs Are Far More Important Than

Of Course I Constantly Despair At My Own Incapacity, At The Impossibility Of Ever Accomplishing Anything, Of Painting A Valid, True Picture Or Even Knowing What Such A Thing Ought To Look Like. But Then I Always Have The Hope That, If I Persevere, It Might One Day Happen. And This Hope Is Nurtured Every Time Something Appears, A Scattered, Partial, Initial Hint Of Something Which Reminds Me Of What I Long For, Or Which Conveys A Hint Of It – Although Often Enough I Have Been Fooled By A Momentary Glimpse That Then Vanishes, Leaving Behind Only The Usual Thing.

I Wanted To Say Something Different: The Pictures Are Also A Leave-taking, In Several Respects. Factually: These Specific Persons Are Dead; As A General Statement, Death Is Leave-taking. And Then Ideologically: A Leave-taking From A Specific Doctrine Of Salvation And, Beyond That, From The Illusion That Unacceptable Circumstances Of Life Can Be Changed By This Conventional Expedient Of Violent Struggle.

... Landscapes Or Still-lifes I Paint In Between The Abstract Works; They Constitute About One-tenth Of My Production. On The One Hand They Are Useful, Because I Like To Work From Nature - Although I Do Use A Photograph - Because I Think That Any Detail From Nature Has A Logic I Would Like To See In Abstraction As Well.

My Work Has So Much To Do With Reality That I Wanted To Have A Corresponding Rightness. That Excludes Painting In Imitation.

I Started Doing 'figures', Then, One Day, All Of A Sudden, I Started Doing Abstraction. And Then I Started Doing Both. But It Was Never Really A Conscious Decision. It Was Simply A Question Of Desire. In Fact, I Really Prefer Making Figurative Work, But The Figure Is Difficult. So To Work Around The Difficulty I Take A Break And Paint Abstractly. Which I Really Like, By The Way, Because It Allows Me To Make Beautiful Paintings.