The Greatest Mystery Of All Is Reality.

What Is Important To Me In My Work Is The Identity That Is Hidden Behind So-called Reality. I Search For A Bridge From The Given Present Tot The Invisible, Rather As A Famous Cabalist Once Said, 'if You Wish To Grasp The Invisible, Penetrate As Deeply As Possible Into The Visible'.

Often, Very Often, I Am Alone. My Studio In Amsterdam, (beckmann Lived In The Center Of Amsterdam During World War 2.) An Enormous Old Tobacco Storeroom Is Again Filled In My Imagination With Figures From The Old Days And From The New, Like An Ocean Moved By Storm And Sun And Always Present In My Thoughts. Then Shapes Become Beings And Seem Comprehensible To Me In The Great Void And Uncertainty Of The Space Which I Call God.

Colour, As The Strange And Magnificent Expression Of The Inscrutable Spectrum Of Eternity, Is Beautiful And Important To Me As A Painter; I Use It To Enrich The Canvas And To Probe More Deeply Into The Object. Colour Also Decided, To A Certain Extent, My Spiritual Outlook, But It Is Subordinated To Life, And Above All, To The Treatment Of Form. Too Much Emphasis On Colour At The Expense Of Form And Space Would Make A Double Manifestation Of Itself On The Canvas, And This Would Verge On Craft Work.

I Hardly Need To Abstract Things, For Each Object Is Unreal Enough Already, So Unreal That I Can Only Make It Real By Means Of Painting.

In Principle, Any Abstraction Of The Object Is Allowed Which Has A Sufficiently Strong Creative Power Behind It.