I.

The principal aspect of my personality – … / The quality that I desire in a man – Sensibility, morality. / The quality that I desire in a woman – Beauty, courage. / What I appreciate most about my friends – Their lives lived so different from mine, their decency. / My main fault – Hesitation. / My favourite occupation – Going to the concert, reading without purpose, walking in the mountains, eating sweets, train rides, looking into the past. / My dream of happiness – Becoming what I am meant to be, living life to its top. / What would be my greatest misfortune? – Letting my demons reign, my undeveloped nature. / What I should like to be – A poet, a father. / The country where I should like to live – The one I thought up as a kid, with many maps and drawings. / My favourite colour – Sisley’s red, Manet’s black, etc. … / My favourite flower – Rose, tulip, carnation. / My favourite bird – Woodstock. / My favourite prose authors – Panaït Istrati, Fontane. / My favourite poets – Heine, Rilke, George. / My heroes in fiction – Krazy Kat. / My favourite heroines in fiction – Krazy Kat. / My favourite composers – Schumann, Brahms, Mahler and Charles Ives.

II.

I hang a painting on the studio wall and it gives me a feeling, I hang another one next it, then another… it is hard to trust my own reactions, they change like the light on a windy day, with clouds traveling across my horizon. I am as uncertain about the painting as I am about myself. I am as clear about it as I can be about myself, too. That is to say: I am in search of a mirror I craft myself. I do not dare to look too closely (my first sin), but painting is rather merciless, it will not give you anything beyond your limitations, and if you deceive yourself about your painting, you are deceiving yourself about your own nature. So there is a clear morality to painting: A kind of seeking of the truth…

Then there is the whole affair of and with the past. Painting is a seance set up to communicate with any past age. There is a way of painting to follow the latest fashion, or a way to discover past fashions. Both paths offer traps, but painting is a rather timeless thing to do, and there is a way in painting of suspending time.

It is also, seemingly, a luxury, but not the kind of luxury that wealth offers. The times I have been completely out of money, it made me want to paint. Not in the hope of selling a painting, but because choosing to paint enrichens, it is the monastic habit of a rich existence.

Painting is about harmony. It is a complex, a symphonic thing. You are dealing with many factors, not just technical ones. I would have to draw a model on a great chalkboard in a lecture hall to connect some of the different aspects of the forces at work: Issues of materials and technique, personal and cultural history, the origins of taste, ideals, and style, things I have seen and things I have never seen, personal faults and the dangers of shortcuts, discouragement, false feelings… it is all tedious but the point is that everything has to work together, the doubts have to be answered and fall silent, and usually that is achieved in a very simple way, at the last moment, anticlimactically.

There is a lot of work necessary to find a simple solution. I am worried sometimes that it makes my work seem too easy. But can I ever really see it with any degree of remove? Looking at one’s own painting truly is like looking into a mirror (O Narcissus), sometimes it makes you feel wonderful and sometimes it makes you feel ugly, a failure, and the worst suspicion is that all the attempted honesty will only lead to revealing something horrible about yourself…or even worse: What if all that people see is you echoing the masters, pretending at discipline, having nothing to offer yourself?