Painting Is Another Form Of Thinking.

I'm Trying To Paint A Picture Of What I Have Seen And What Moved Me, As Well As I Can. That's All.

I Never Worked At Painting As If It Were A Job; It Was Always Out Of Interest Or For Fun, A Desire To Try Something.

A Work Of Art Is Itself An Object, First Of All, And So Manipulation Is Unavoidable: It's A Prerequisite. But I Needed The Greater Objectivity Of The Photograph In Order To Correct My Own Way Of Seeing: For Instance, If I Draw An Object From Nature, I Start To Stylize And To Change It In Accordance With My Personal Vision And My Training. But If I Paint From A Photograph, I Can Forget All The Criteria That I Get From These Sources. I Can Paint Against My Will, As It Were. And That, To Me, Felt Like An Enrichment.

The Desire To Please Is Maligned, Unfairly. There Are Many Sides To It. First Of All, Pictures Have To Arouse Interest Before People Will Even Look At Them, And Then They Have To Show Something That Holds That Interst - And Naturally They Have To Be Presentable, Just As A Song Has To Be Sung Well, Otherwise People Run Away. One Mustn't Underrate This Quality, And I Have Always Been Delighted When My Pieces Have Also Appealed To The Museum Guards, The Laymen.

When I First Painted A Number Of Canvases Grey All Over (about Eight Years Ago), I Did So Because I Did Not Know What To Paint, Or What There Might Be To Paint: So Wretched A Start Could Lead To Nothing Meaningful. As Time Went On, However, I Observed Differences Of Quality Among The Grey Surfaces - And Also That These Betrayed Nothing Of The Destructive Motivation That Lay Behind Them. The Pictures Began To Teach Me. By Generalizing A Personal Dilemma, They Resolved It.