Art Is Always To A Large Extent

I Am Thankful That The Church Exists, Thankful That It Has Done Such Great Things, Giving Us Laws, For Instance - 'thou Shalt' And 'thou Shalt Not', And Established Goodness And Evil. That's What All Religions Do, And As Soon As We Try To Replace Them, Worldly Religions Like Fascism And Communism Take Over.

And Then The Work Bears A Strong Sense Of Leave-taking For Me Personally. It Ends The Work I Began In The 1960s (paintings From Black-and-white Photographs), With A Compressed Summation That Precludes Any Possible Continuation. And So It Is A Leave-taking From Thoughts And Feelings Of My Own On A Very Basic Level. Not That This Is A Deliberate Act, Of Course; It Is A Quasi-automatic Sequence Of Disintegration And Reformation Which I Can Perceive, As Always, Only In Retrospect.

In The Beginning I Tried To Accommodate Everything There That Was Somewhere Between Art And Garbage And That Somehow Seemed Important To Me And A Pity To Throw Away. After A While, Some Sheets In The Atlas Acquired Another Value, After All - That Is, It Seemed To Me That They Could Stand On Their Own Terms, Not Only Under The Protection Of The Atlas.

Perhaps The Choice Is A Negative One, In That I Was Trying To Avoid Everything That Touched On Well-known Issues - Or Any Issues At All, Whether Painterly, Social Or Aesthetic. I Tried To Find Nothing Too Explicit, Hence All The Banal Subjects; And Then, Again, I Tried To Avoid Letting The Banal Turn Into My Issue And My Trademark. So It's All Evasive Action, In A Way.

Above All, It's Never Blind Chance: It's A Chance That Is Always Planned, But Also Always Surprising. And I Need It In Order To Carry On, In Order To Eradicate My Mistakes, To Destroy What I've Worked Out Wrong, To Introduce Something Different And Disruptive. I'm Often Astonished To Find How Much Better Chance Is Than I Am.