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

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

I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.

Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.

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