All Important Things In Art Have Always

It Is, Of Course, A Luxury To Create Art And, On Top Of This, To Insist On Expressing One's Own Artistic Opinion. Nothing Is More Luxurious Than This. It Is A Game And A Good Game, At Least For Me; One Of The Few Games Which Make Life, Difficult And Depressing As It Is Sometimes, A Little More Interesting.

I Am Seeking For The Bridge Which Leans From The Visible To The Invisible Through Reality.

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.

I Went Across The Fields To Avoid The Straight Highways, Along The Firing Lines Where People Were Shooting At A Small Wooded Hill, Which Is Now Covered With Wooden Crosses And Lines Of Graves Instead Of Spring Flowers.

I Have Never, God Or Whatever Knows, Prostrated Myself To Be Famous, But I Would Meander Through All The Sewers Of The World, Through All Degradations And Humiliations, In Order To Paint. I Have To Do This. Until The Last Drop Every Vision That Exists In My Being Must Be Purged; Then It Will Be A Pleasure For Me To Be Rid Of This Damned Torture