I Am Ridiculously Old-fashioned.

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.

I Didn't Actually Know What The Protesters In The West Really Wanted. It Was Fantastic Here, So Much Freedom, And That Was What They Were Calling Musty, Middle-class, And Fascistic, A Bleak Period. Bleak Was What The Gdr Was, And It Alone Had Adopted, Almost Unchanged, Nazi Germany's Methods Of Intimidation And Ideas About Propaganda And The Use Of Force.

The Photograph Is The Most Perfect Picture. It Does Not Change; It Is Absolute, And Therefore Autonomous, Unconditional, Devoid Of Style. Both In Its Way Of Informing, And In What It Informs Of, It Is My Source.

Only About One Per Cent Of My Paintings Show Family Members. Do They Help Me Deal With Problems? It's Likely That These Problems Can Only Be Depicted. But Photographs, Private Ones And Others, Keep Appearing That Fascinate Me So Much That I Want To Paint Them. And Sometimes The Real Meaning These Images Have For Me Only Becomes Apparent Later.

... 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.