I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.

But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all - or is not even possible. The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.

There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.

I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.

It is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.