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.

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

Without form, communication stops... without form, you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one else can understand and - rightly - no one else is interested in.

To believe, one must have lost God. To paint, one must have lost art.

I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.

How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.

Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make 'nothing' visible.