Painting Is Another Form Of Thinking.

I First Came Up With The Idea For The Colour-chart Pictures Back In 1966, And My Preoccupation With The Topic Culminated In 1974 With A Painting That Consisted Of 4,096 Colour Fields. Initially I Was Attracted By The Typical Pop Art Aestheticism Of Using Standard Colour-sample Cards; I Preferred The Unartistic, Tasteful And Secular Illustration Of The Different Tones To The Paintings Of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, Etc.

Painting Is Traditional But For Me That Doesn't Mean The Academy. I Felt A Need To Paint; I Love Painting. It Was Something Natural - As Is Listening To Music Or Playing An Instrument For Some People. For This Reason I Searched For Themes Of My Era And My Generation. Photography Offered This, So I Chose It As A Medium For Painting.

But My Motivation Was More A Matter Of Wanting To Create Order - To Keep Track Of Things. All Those Boxes Full Of Photographs And Sketches Weigh You Down, Because They Have Something Unfinished, Incomplete, About Them. So It's Better To Present The Usable Material In An Orderly Fashion And Throw The Other Stuff Away. That's How The Atlas Came To Be, And I Exhibited It A Few Times.

To Make A Photograph Is Already The First Artificial Act.

My Landscapes Are Not Only Beautiful, Or Nostalgic, With A Romantic Or Classical Suggestion Of Lost Paradises, But Above All 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I Mean The Glorifying Way We Look At Nature. Nature, Which In All Its Forms Is Always Against Us, Because It Knows No Meaning, No Pity, No Sympathy, Because It Knows Nothing And Is Absolutely Mindless, The Total Antithesis Of Ourselves.