Suddenly, I Saw It In A New

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.

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.

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.

I Pursue No Objectives, No Systems, No Tendency; I Have No Program, No Style, No Direction. I Have No Time For Specialized Concerns, Working Themes, Or Variations That Lead To Mastery. I Steer Clear Of Definitions. I Don’t Know What I Want. I Am Inconsistent, Non-committal, Passive; I Like The Indefinite, The Boundless; I Like Continual Uncertainty.

Painting Is Traditional But For Me That Doesn't Mean The Academy. I Felt A Need To Paint; I Love Painting. It Was Something Natural - As Is Listening To Music Or Playing An Instrument For Some People. For This Reason I Searched For Themes Of My Era And My Generation. Photography Offered This, So I Chose It As A Medium For Painting.