Yes, We Were Amazed When That Happened.

To Me, Grey Is The Welcome And Only Possible Equivalent For Indifference, Noncommitment, Absence Of Opinion, Absence Of Shape. But Grey, Like Formlessness And The Rest, Can Be Real Only As An Idea, And So All I Can Do Is Create A Colour Nuance That Means Grey But Is Not It. The Painting Is Then A Mixture Of Grey As A Fiction And Grey As A Visible, Designated Area Of Colour.

But I Would Like To Reach The Point Where I Could Cut Up An Illustrated Magazine At Random And See To It That The Parts Would Each Become A Painting. I Cannot Properly Explain It Right Now. Already Now I Am Searching For The Most Boring And Irrelevant Photo Material That I Can Find. And I Would Like To Get To The Point Soon Where This Determined Irrelevance Could Be Retained, In Favor Of Something That Would Be Covered Up Otherwise By Artifice.

Photography Has Almost No Reality; It Is Almost A Hundred Per Cent Picture. And Painting Always Has Reality: You Can Touch The Paint; It Has Presence; But It Always Yields A Picture - No Matter Whether Good Or Bad. That's All The Theory. It's No Good. I Once Took Some Small Photographs And Then Smeared Them With Paint. That Partly Resolved The Problem, And It's Really Good - Better Than Anything I Could Ever Say On The Subject.

I Find The Romantic Period Extraordinarily Interesting. My Landscapes Have Connections With Romanticism: At Times I Feel A Real Desire For, An Attraction To, This Period, And Some Of My Pictures Are A Homage To Caspar David Friedrich.

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.