My Paintings Are Wiser Than I Am.

When I Look Back On The Townscapes Now, They Do Seem To Me To Recall Certain Images Of The Destruction Of Dresden During The War.

To Make A Photograph Is Already The First Artificial Act.

I See The Bomber Pictures As An Anti-war Statement... Which They Aren't - At All. Pictures Like That Don't Do Anything To Combat War. They Only Show One Tiny Aspect Of The Subject Of War - Maybe Only My Own Childish Feelings Of Fear And Fascination With War And With Weapons Of That Kind.

And Then The Work Bears A Strong Sense Of Leave-taking For Me Personally. It Ends The Work I Began In The 1960s (paintings From Black-and-white Photographs), With A Compressed Summation That Precludes Any Possible Continuation. And So It Is A Leave-taking From Thoughts And Feelings Of My Own On A Very Basic Level. Not That This Is A Deliberate Act, Of Course; It Is A Quasi-automatic Sequence Of Disintegration And Reformation Which I Can Perceive, As Always, Only In Retrospect.

The Painter Sees The Semblance Of Things And Repeats It. That Is, Without Fabricating The Things Himself, He Fabricates Their Semblance; And, If That No Longer Recalls Any Object, This Artificially Produced Semblance Functions Only Because It Is Scrutinized For Likeness To A Familiar - That Is, Object-related - Semblance.