Abstract on Glass

For a long time I did abstraction just for myself. I made my living from portraits — mostly portraits of musicians.

I have a lot of musician friends, because I love music. I don’t know that many painters. :)

Most of them — let’s say ninety percent of musicians — go to the orchestra as if to a job, and when they come home they put the instrument in the corner and go off to do their own thing — windsurfing, or working in the garden. But the remaining ten percent come home from work and devote themselves to music there too. They usually still play in several bands at once and compose their own music. And they end up, by way of blues, at jazz. Except those ninety percent of professionals can’t play that jazz with them, because they need sheet music for everything.

And it’s the same with abstraction among painters. Good abstraction is like good jazz. It’s freedom, not the slavish copying of a fleeting reality.

I was painting large compositions and large-scale works on walls. The consumption of paint was enormous, and soon no palette was big enough for me. While I was thinking about where to mix the colors, my eye fell on a sheet of tempered glass that slid into a wooden display case a carpenter had made for me years before. I flipped it glass-side up, mounted wheels on the back, and had a large mobile table — an enormous glass palette.

And soon after, I painted the first picture directly onto that glass. I was curious how it looked from the other side, and in that moment the whole thing began. :)