Painting Is Another Form Of Thinking.

Well, The Beginning Is Actually Quite Easy, Because I Can Still Be Quite Free About The Way I Handle Things - Colours, Shapes. And So A Picture Emerges That May Look Quite Good For A While, So Airy And Colourful And New. But That Will Only Last For A Day At Most, At Which Point It Starts To Look Cheap And Fake. And Then The Real Work Begins - Changing, Eradicating, Starting Again, And So On, Until It's Done.

Pictures Are The Idea In Visual Or Pictorial Form; And The Idea Has To Be Legible, Both In The Individual Picture And In The Collective Context - Which Presupposes, Of Course, That Words Are Used To Convey Information About The Idea And The Context. However, None Of This Means That Pictures Function As Illustrations Of An Idea: Ultimately, They Are The Idea. Nor Is The Verbal Formulation Of The Idea A Translation Of The Visual: It Simply Bears A Certain Resemblance To The Meaning Of The Idea. It Is An Interpretation, Literally A Reflection.

I First Came Up With The Idea For The Colour-chart Pictures Back In 1966, And My Preoccupation With The Topic Culminated In 1974 With A Painting That Consisted Of 4,096 Colour Fields. Initially I Was Attracted By The Typical Pop Art Aestheticism Of Using Standard Colour-sample Cards; I Preferred The Unartistic, Tasteful And Secular Illustration Of The Different Tones To The Paintings Of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, Etc.

Without Form, Communication Stops... Without Form, You Have Everybody Burbling On To Themselves, Whenever And However, Things That No One Else Can Understand And - Rightly - No One Else Is Interested In.

The Grey Paintings, For Example, A Painted Grey Surface, Completely Monochromatic - They Come From A Motivation, Or Result From A State, That Was Very Negative. It Has A Lot To Do With Hopelessness, Depression And Such Things. But It Has To Be Turned On Its Head In The End, And Has To Come To A Form Where These Paintings Possess Beauty. And In This Case, It's Not A Carefree Beauty, But Rather A Serious One.