Now There Are No Priests

I Choose Depending On The Way I Feel; Randomly, In Other Words. When I Haven't Done Anything For A Long Time, I Always Start Small, On Paper.

Perhaps The Choice Is A Negative One, In That I Was Trying To Avoid Everything That Touched On Well-known Issues - Or Any Issues At All, Whether Painterly, Social Or Aesthetic. I Tried To Find Nothing Too Explicit, Hence All The Banal Subjects; And Then, Again, I Tried To Avoid Letting The Banal Turn Into My Issue And My Trademark. So It's All Evasive Action, In A Way.

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.

I Wanted To Make It As Anonymous As A Photo. But It Was Perhaps Also The Wish For Perfection, The Unapproachable, Which Then Means Loss Of Immediacy. Something Is Missing Then, Though; That Is Why I Gave That Up.

I Often Need A Long Time To Understand Things, To Imagine A Painting I Might Make.