What Are You? What Am I? Those

The Metaphysics Of Substance. The Strange Feeling Which Comes Over Us When We Sense: This Is Skin - This Is Bone - All In A Single Vision That Is Completely Unearthly. The Dreaminess Of Our Existence Mixed At The Same Time With The Indescribably Sweet Illusion Of Reality.

Often, Very Often, I Am Alone. My Studio In Amsterdam, (beckmann Lived In The Center Of Amsterdam During World War 2.) An Enormous Old Tobacco Storeroom Is Again Filled In My Imagination With Figures From The Old Days And From The New, Like An Ocean Moved By Storm And Sun And Always Present In My Thoughts. Then Shapes Become Beings And Seem Comprehensible To Me In The Great Void And Uncertainty Of The Space Which I Call God.

I Went Across The Fields To Avoid The Straight Highways, Along The Firing Lines Where People Were Shooting At A Small Wooded Hill, Which Is Now Covered With Wooden Crosses And Lines Of Graves Instead Of Spring Flowers.

My Heart Beats More For A Raw, Average Vulgar Art, Which Doesn't Live Between Sleepy Fairy-tale Moods And Poetry But Rather Concedes A Direct Entrance To The Fearful, Commonplace, Splendid And The Average Grotesque Banality In Life.

All Important Things In Art Have Always Originated From The Deepest Feeling About The Mystery Of Being.