Chance

Painting means an oppurtunity for a chance. Chance does not happen but through a work. Ideas tend to stiffen and make paintings more boring. One wants to get rid of any ideas as soon as possible. Ideas tend to haunt though. Usually, in the beginning, there is a vague idea of some form, colour, feeling, place and time or even of a sound or a smell. The first idea can also be some kind of collection or combination of these all. A painter does not usually know where these essences come from but it is through work that the painting really develops, and into new directions.
Painting trusts in painter and wants to show something of the reality, figure it out. Painter's task is to trust in a painting, in what Ihe/she is doing. It is then chance's role to fill the void, the gap between me, actuality and a painting, add something extra, something unknown to the painting, that excess of the reality, that is always out there.

Oscillation

Normally a painting has been excisting a long time before it has become a painting. Its excisting is oscillating in the virtual, that is like a mouth, opening and closing. It is not a matter of a fixed idea, but a matter of letting the painting happen.

Virtual

I think it was Heidegger who told that a gesture is a gathering of the bearing. I like to think that painting is a medium for this gesture. A painter is alongside the event of painting and has given his/hers body to the painting in which the gesture can write.
In a painting it is not possible to separate possible and real. Painting is a kind of proof for that. It figures itself.
The virtual opens a space that gathers at the same time, figures itself. Virtuality is always actuality.

Gestures

For a painter the painting is a container of gestures. You can think of a painting as a medium for gestures or as a threshold that opens up the gestures. Painting gives proof of gestures. What is then a gesture?