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When i first painted a number of canvases grey all over (about eight years ago), i did so because i did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful. as time went on, however, i observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces - and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. the pictures began to teach me. by generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it.
-Gerhard Richter
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When I First Painted A Number Of

Gerhard Richter
When i first painted a number of canvases grey all over (about eight years ago), i did so because i did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful. as time went on, however, i observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces - and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. the pictures began to teach me. by generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it.
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Meaningful Art Motivation

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Quality doesn't mean deep blacks and whatever tonal range. that's not quality, that's a kind of quality. the pictures of robert frank might strike someone as being sloppy-the tone range isn't right and things like that-but they're far superior to the pictures of ansel adams with regard to quality, because the quality of ansel adams, if i may say so, is essentially the quality of a postcard. but the quality of robert frank is a quality that has something to do with what he's doing, what his mind is. it's not balancing out the sky to the sand and so forth. it's got to do with intention.
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Man's greatness is great in that he knows himself wretched. a tree does not know itself wretched. it is then being wretched to know oneself wretched; but it is being great to know that one is wretched.
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I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. they don't teach you how to love somebody. they don't teach you how to be famous. they don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. they don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. they don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. they don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. they don't teach you anything worth knowing.
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I began to paint again, even though i could barely hold the brush, but knowing exactly what i wanted to paint, i began three more large canvases... of large wheat fields under cloudy skies, and it did not take a great deal to express sadness and loneliness... i believe these paintings say what words cannot.
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To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. but grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all i can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. the painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.
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Even the sky was grey. grey and grey and greyer. the whole world grey, everywhere you look, everything grey except the eyes of the bride. the eyes of the bride were brown. big and brown and full of fear.
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