The series ‘Meditations’ resulted after a turning point in my artistic thinking. After some years of creating systematic, hard-edge, geometric colour-field paintings on shaped canvases, I felt that I had painted myself out of the picture. I needed to find a way to give more expression to the thoughts and emotions I was experiencing at the time.

‘Meditations’ comprises large acrylic paintings (175 x 175 cm and 200 x 200 cm) on canvas and smaller gouaches on paper. They were first exhibited at Galerie Artek in 1997. In this series, I had adopted a monochromatic colour scale, either red or blue and sometimes black and grey tones. In the acrylics the paint has been applied in thin washes onto a ground of a more or less complementary colour to the surface layers. I had brushes up to 30 cm wide specially manufactured to make these paintings. I laid the canvas on the floor and often used the brush on the end of a long handle, like a broom, and climbing up on a ladder every now and then to inspect the result.

Creating these paintings required extreme physical and mental concentration – the brush marks could not be corrected or touched up afterwards. I was not at all interested in the kind of expressionism found in Action Painting and Tachisme. Rather than splashing and pouring my own emotions onto the canvas, I sought some kind of universality of emotions through a more detached approch. I guess Mark Rothko loomed quite large behind these paintings. Otherwise, the inspiration came from certain musical timbres, from meditating the transience of life, from thinking about loss and longing – and from the large-scale calligraphy in Japanese Buddhist temples.