Picturing Things, Taking A View, Is What

A Work Of Art Is Itself An Object, First Of All, And So Manipulation Is Unavoidable: It's A Prerequisite. But I Needed The Greater Objectivity Of The Photograph In Order To Correct My Own Way Of Seeing: For Instance, If I Draw An Object From Nature, I Start To Stylize And To Change It In Accordance With My Personal Vision And My Training. But If I Paint From A Photograph, I Can Forget All The Criteria That I Get From These Sources. I Can Paint Against My Will, As It Were. And That, To Me, Felt Like An Enrichment.

I Don't Know What Motivated The Artist, Which Means That The Paintings Have An Intrinsic Quality. I Think Goethe Called It The 'essential Dimension,' The Thing That Makes Great Works Of Art Great.

As Far As The Surface Is Concerned - Oil On Canvas, Conventionally Applied - My Pictures Have Little To Do With The Original Photograph. They Are Totally Painting (whatever That May Mean). On The Other Hand, They Are So Like The Photograph That The Thing That Distinguished The Photograph From All Other Pictures Remains Intact.

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.

It Was Not Possible For Us To Produce The Same Optimism And The Same Kind Of Humour Or Irony. Actually, It Was Not Irony. Lichtenstein Is Not Ironic But He Does Have A Special Kind Of Humour. That's How I Could Describe It: Humour And Optimism. For Polke And Me, Everything Was More Fragmented. But How It Was Broken Up Is Hard To Describe.