Lettl on Lettl

Painting has taught me two things:

First of all, an awareness of my own limitations:
I sit in front of a blank sheet of white paper and try to imagine something; all possibilities are open to me, but I seem to be producing nothing but senseless scribbles and silly stuff.

That’s how I waste my time and paper for hours and days on end. The sum total is zero, although I may have thought that I had lots of ideas.

Then suddenly, the feeling that something has succeeded, to my surprise, because now there is something of which I had known nothing beforehand and that wouldn’t exist if I had not made it.

Every successful picture is a new reality and thus a part of unfinished creation, no matter how modest.

What I want to do is simple: paint beautiful pictures.
But beauty always has to do with truth and, like truth, can only be comprehended piecemeal by us, the descendants of apes, and on a case by case basis.

And because beauty cannot be forced, I have always tried to paint pictures that were at least not stupid, and I am happy when somebody likes them.