Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.

I was walking along a road one evening – on one side lay the city, and below me was the fjord. The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming – it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colours screamed.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color

I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.