Throwaway Snapshots Come Closest To Achieving The

Of Course I Constantly Despair At My Own Incapacity, At The Impossibility Of Ever Accomplishing Anything, Of Painting A Valid, True Picture Or Even Knowing What Such A Thing Ought To Look Like. But Then I Always Have The Hope That, If I Persevere, It Might One Day Happen. And This Hope Is Nurtured Every Time Something Appears, A Scattered, Partial, Initial Hint Of Something Which Reminds Me Of What I Long For, Or Which Conveys A Hint Of It – Although Often Enough I Have Been Fooled By A Momentary Glimpse That Then Vanishes, Leaving Behind Only The Usual Thing.

The Smudging Makes The Paintings A Bit More Complete. When They're Not Blurred, So Many Details Seem Wrong, And The Whole Thing Is Wrong Too. Then Smudging Can Help Make The Painting Invincible, Surreal, More Enigmatic - That's How Easy It Is.

Of Course, Pictures Of Objects Also Have This Transcendental Side To Them. Every Object, Being Part Of An Ultimately Incomprehensible World, Also Embodies That World; When Represented In A Picture, The Object Conveys This Mystery All The More Powerfully, The Less Of A 'function' The Picture Has. Hence, For Instance, The Growing Fascination Of Many Beautiful Old Portraits.

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.

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.