Kuhn on Kuhn
To me, painting is like a journey into an unknown world. With my paint brushes ready at hand I travel in my mind to forgotten lands, lost deep in the obscure corners of memory, and penetrate to undiscovered islands of emotion. In those far lands I meet strange people, creatures of the imagination. They are poets, fiddlers, sailors, tramps. Their heads are large and their bodies out of proportion. I invite them to come with me and I set them on canvas, where they can live again, smoking their pipes, talking and wondering at this new existence. In their funny hats and coats, playing primitive fiddles and flutes, they feel equally at home in flat, two-dimensional houses or among steep mountains reaching towards the sky and a blue sun. Animals as strange as themselves accompany them in their daily, unending tasks. Time does not exist as long as the canvas holds together
their universe, the world created out of paint in which they exist. And this world is a real world, as real as ours. We have only to understand its different laws. For me the Old Man from the Mountains, resting on a stone on the way to town, with his tiny dog at the end of a lead, is a real person. I expect him sometimes to get up and move. He never does, but he speaks to me from his place on the wall and amuses me when I am depressed. He is a poet and he has many stories for those who can accept his strange existence fashioned out of shapes and colours. I am sure there are many such individual worlds hidden in our inner selves, waiting to be discovered by artists and poets. Perhaps they may help us to understand more of our world of which we know so little... Andrzej Kuhn From The British Journal of Aesthetics, 1961.