If You Wish To Get Hold Of

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

Love In An Animal Sense Is An Illness, But A Necessity Which One Has To Overcome.

As A Painter, Cursed Or Blessed With A Terrible And Vital Sensuousness, I Must Look For Wisdom With My Eyes. I Repeat, With My Eyes, For Nothing Could Be More Ridiculous Or Irrelevant Than A 'philosophical Conception Painted Purely Intellectually Without The Terrible Fury Of The Senses Grasping Each Visible Form Of Beauty And Ugliness.

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.

We Will Enjoy Ourselves With The Forms That Are Given Us: A Human Face, A Hand, The Breast Of A Woman Or The Body Of A Man, A Glad Or Sorrowful Expression, The Infinite Seas, The Wild Rocks, The Melancholy Language Of The Black Trees In The Snow, The Wild Strength Of Spring Flowers And The Heavy Lethargy Of A Hot Summer Day When Pan, Our Old Friend, Sleeps And The Ghosts Of Midday Whisper. This Alone Is Enough To Make Us Forget The Grief Of The World, Or To Give It Form.