If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age

If I paint like a barbarian, it's because we live in a barbarous age

You have to learn it all, then forget it and start again like a child. This is the inner evolution.

Every day I have to be awake to escape.. ..The whole world is sleepy. It is a real fight to be awake, to see everything new, for the first time in your life.

My paint is like a rocket, which describes its own space. I try to make the impossible possible. What is happening I cannot foresee, it is a surprise. Painting, like passion, is an emotion full of truth and rings a living sound, like the roar coming from the lion's breast. To paint is to destroy what preceded. I never try to make a painting, but a chunk of life. It is a scream; it is a night; it is like a child; it is a tiger behind bars.

I'm not a pessimist. Maybe I don't have a primitive feeling of happiness, that is true. Sometimes my color is happy but not the expression.

When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, 'The leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.