Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.
What I am trying to do is something different - an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.
I really enjoy squeezing out a big lump of paint directly onto the canvas and leaving it; fresh, immediate and sometimes shocking.
You can always tell a great painting, because when you get close there are all these nervous marks.
I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.
I applied streaks and blobs of colors onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could.
I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.
Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter's soul.
The unity in any painter's work arises from the fact that a person, brought to a desperate situation, will behave in a certain way... style.
The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?
And then I went round the corner and there's a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it's not the level of Van Gogh.
It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.
To my eye Rubens' colouring is most contemptible. His shadows are a filthy brown somewhat the colour of excrement.
Monet's garden must be included with his works, because he combined the magic of an adaptation of nature with the work of a painter of light. An extension of the studio into the openair, with color tones lavishly spread out on all sides to exercise the eye with seductive vibrations, from which a feverishly aroused retina expects unquenchable joy.
