Collage shortcuts

When I started painting – I was 15 – my mother showed me a flower still life in our living room and asked me why I didn’t paint that way. And my father looking at a beautiful sunset suggested a painting. I must admit that I disappointed both of them quite a lot. But I felt already that my personal taste was quite different from theirs - even if I have found out that you can make more money with painted flowers or sunsets than with my style.
Can’t I appreciate a bouquet or a sunset? Sure I do, but I wouldn’t paint it as I see it. It remembers me that when I travelled, I found the places less interesting than in the books where they were described. Grass is always green, and you have to be a genius to see/paint it red (Gauguin, Jacob’s struggle with the angel) or like Kandinsky in his early paintings. What I mean is that it is difficult to render a sensation in a very conventional way. Imagine a British gentleman in a silent movie declaring his (muted) flame to a mute dame.
When I started painting, I started with color. Green heads, orange hair, like German expressionists. Some ten years later, I was in a deep crisis. I couldn’t put the colors together anymore. There was always something wrong. I chose to paint monochrome for over a year, adding slowly one color , then two and so on. Now I understand that I didn’t know how to escape sweetness. At the same time, I started making collages, in black&white .In collage, I think forms and content, edges, cuts and fragments becoming a whole. I don’t build on color because it would lead to Matisse, or something that would become so sweet, so nice - a lollypop. Dramatic paintings are without much color, like Caravaggio, Goya, Doré. I feel closer to them. When I appreciate a sunset in a Munch painting it’s because of the strange colors in the sky, the dramatic feeling I read in it.
When my mother died, my brother brought the painting she had shown me to an expert – it was a worthless copy. That’s exactly what I feel about painted flower bouquets. I prefer the real thing. Same for the sunset.
I stick with collage – nobody can copy them and you will never meet the real thing.