Emil Nodle

"This is what I saw, imagined, experienced; this is how it was for me; this is how I felt about it. I, the artist, offer you this experience because as artist I am sensitised to a special degree and devote my life to this thin-skinned experience and to finding ways of capturing it to you, my public. I am one, unique through a part of mankind. You are many; most of your time, your education and your work, if not leisure too, is designed to restrain your experience, to thicken your skin. How shall I address you? Not through the conventions of European art, worn smooth with endless use; they no longer connect with life and do not permit me to set down my personal apprehension of it. Strong colours, emphatic rather than then accurate representation and especially distortion in my delineation of figures will catch your attention but may also numb your responses by making too strong an assault. I handle these colours daily and they don’t bother me; the drawing that strikes you as incompetent is how I want it. Yet can you learn to read it, respond to it, especially since I have to adapt my manner continually to changes in my situation and myself? I want you to use my art, to counter with it the deadening weight of urban life. Indeed my insistence on self-centred art is only justified if it helps you to discover your true self, but, in order to reveal myself, I have had to abandon what shared visual language there was as a link between us."