My Work Has So Much To Do

My Work Has So Much To Do With Reality That I Wanted To Have A Corresponding Rightness. That Excludes Painting In Imitation.

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.

A Work Of Art Is Itself An Object, First Of All, And So Manipulation Is Unavoidable: It's A Prerequisite. But I Needed The Greater Objectivity Of The Photograph In Order To Correct My Own Way Of Seeing: For Instance, If I Draw An Object From Nature, I Start To Stylize And To Change It In Accordance With My Personal Vision And My Training. But If I Paint From A Photograph, I Can Forget All The Criteria That I Get From These Sources. I Can Paint Against My Will, As It Were. And That, To Me, Felt Like An Enrichment.

There Was No Special Event That Made Me Decide. I Had Collected Some Photos And The Idea Was In The Back Of My Mind For A Long Time. It Was Growing And Growing, So Finally I Said, 'i Must Paint This.' I Come From East Germany And Am Not A Marxist, So Of Course At The Time I Had No Sympathy For The Ideas, Or For The Ideology That These People Represented. I Couldn't Understand, But I Was Still Impressed. Like Everyone, I Was Touched. It Was An Exceptional Moment For Germany.

Painting Is My Profession, Because It Has Always Been The Thing That Interested Me Most. I'm Of A Certain Age, I Come From A Different Tradition And, In Any Case, I Can't Do Anything Else. I'm Still Very Sure That Painting Is One Of The Most Basic Human Capacities, Like Dancing And Singing, That Make Sense, That Stay With Us, As Something Human.