Art Is Not A Substitute Religion: It

But I Would Like To Reach The Point Where I Could Cut Up An Illustrated Magazine At Random And See To It That The Parts Would Each Become A Painting. I Cannot Properly Explain It Right Now. Already Now I Am Searching For The Most Boring And Irrelevant Photo Material That I Can Find. And I Would Like To Get To The Point Soon Where This Determined Irrelevance Could Be Retained, In Favor Of Something That Would Be Covered Up Otherwise By Artifice.

Form Is All We Have To Help Us Cope With Fundamentally Chaotic Facts And Assaults. Formulating Something Is A Great Start. I Trust Form, Trust My Feeling Or Capacity To Find The Right Form For Something. Even If That Is Only By Being Well Organized. That Too Is Form.

Photography Has Almost No Reality; It Is Almost A Hundred Per Cent Picture. And Painting Always Has Reality: You Can Touch The Paint; It Has Presence; But It Always Yields A Picture - No Matter Whether Good Or Bad. That's All The Theory. It's No Good. I Once Took Some Small Photographs And Then Smeared Them With Paint. That Partly Resolved The Problem, And It's Really Good - Better Than Anything I Could Ever Say On The Subject.

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.

As A Matter Of Fact, It Was Only Through The Dealer Fred Jahn That I Succeeded In Overcoming My Reservation About The Works On Paper And Exhibiting Them. Added To This, Of Course, Was The Fact That After Ten Years I Could See The Watercolours In A Different Light, And In Conjunction With Pictures Painted Afterwards, They Had At Least Become More Comprehensible To Me.