2007 Q1

Art statement

Painting is a very engaging act. My body and my mind need to be fully alert, and my eyesight very acute. I certainly don’t want to impose my will on a painting. Rather I try to be sensitive to it, understand the painting’s needs and carefully provide what is necessary for the painting to become sovereign. Painting requires attention, time and silence.

I consider a painting finished when it has a life of its own; under its flat surface the painting must shine. And the energy that radiates should be intimate and enigmatic. A good painting can reach deep into souls.

I find inspiration from various objects, scenes and events that I stumble upon in my everyday life. I like to reference and learn from powerful painters with strong individualities. I like to study their paintings but also their persona. When I make a portrait, rather then focusing on resemblance, I try to reflect on somebody’s character. If I fail to capture a person's spirit, the portrait is dead.

Painting is a meditative exercise through which I can refine perception, strengthen understanding and reach higher levels of consciousness. Moments when energy flows in my veins, moments when nature reverberates in my mind are blessed. I feel a tremendous need for streaming my joy into concrete forms. And while I construct forms, figures and scenes, a newborn painting slowly starts reflecting upon me.

Poweful quotes by Pablo Picasso:

• • "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

  • "It takes a long time to become young."

  • "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

  • "Art is the elimination of the unnecessary."

  • "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, thanks to their art and intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun."

  • "Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."

  • "If there is something to steal, I steal it!"

  • "Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility."

  • "To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic."

  • "Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

  • "An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought."

  • "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

  • "I do not seek. I find."

  • "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."

  • "To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture."

  • "We don't grow older, we grow riper."

  • "My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso."

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A witty quote by Diego Velázquez:

• • "I would rather be the first painter of common things than second in higher art."

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Sensible quotes by Oskar Kokoschka:

• • "The life of the consciousness is boundless. It interpenetrates the world and is woven in all its imagery... Therefore, we must hearken closely to our inner voice."

  • "However ugly a face may be, we can discover some beauty in it if we first experience wonder before it and then begin to understand it, too."

  • "How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing."

  • "I consider myself responsible to the coming generations, which are left stranded in a blitzed world, unaware of the soul trembling in awe before the mystery of life."

  • "I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. I could not do this if my sitter had to keep still ... or to hold a stiff pose until we were both sick of it. A person is not a still-life – not even a dead person."

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