I Am Ridiculously Old-fashioned.

The Grey Paintings, For Example, A Painted Grey Surface, Completely Monochromatic - They Come From A Motivation, Or Result From A State, That Was Very Negative. It Has A Lot To Do With Hopelessness, Depression And Such Things. But It Has To Be Turned On Its Head In The End, And Has To Come To A Form Where These Paintings Possess Beauty. And In This Case, It's Not A Carefree Beauty, But Rather A Serious One.

Illusion - Or Rather Appearance, Semblance - Is The Theme Of My Life (could Be Theme Of Speech Welcoming Freshmen To The Academy). All That Is, Seems, And Is Visible To Us Because We Perceive It By The Reflected Light Of Semblance. Nothing Else Is Visible.

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

As I See It, All Of Them - Tachists, Action Painters, Informel Artists, And The Rest - Are Only Part Of An Informel Movement That Covers A Lot Of Other Things As Well. I Think There's An Informel Element In Beuys, As Well; But It All Began With Duchamp And Chance, Or With Mondrian, Or With The Impressionists. The Informel Is The Opposite Of The Constructional Quality Of Classicism - The Age Of Kings, Or Clearly Formed Hierarchies.

Suddenly, I Saw It In A New Way, As A Picture That Offered Me A New View, Free Of All The Conventional Criteria I Had Always Associated With Art. It Had No Style, No Composition, No Judgment. It Freed Me From Personal Experience. For The First Time, There Was Nothing To It: It Was Pure Picture. That's Why I Wanted To Have It, To Show It - Not Use It As A Means To Painting But Use Painting As A Means To Photography.