“I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of ‘work,’ because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always giong. Even when you sleep.”
He sticks to a strict routine, waking at 6:15 every morning. He makes breakfast for his family, takes Ella to school at 7:20 and is in the studio by 8. At 1 o’clock, he crosses the garden from the studio back to the house. The grass in the garden is uncut. Richter proudly points this out, to show that even it is a matter of his choosing, not by chance. At 1 o’clock, he eats lunch in the dining room, alone. A housekeeper lays out the same meal for him each day: yogurt, tomatoes, bread, olive oil and chamomile tea.
After lunch, Richter returns to his studio to work into the evening. ”I have always been structured,” he explains. ”What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.” He claims to waste time — on the house, the garden — although this is hard to believe. ”I go to the studio every day, but I don’t paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things. Weeks go by, and I don’t paint until finally I can’t stand it any longer. I get fed up. I almost don’t want to talk about it, because I don’t want to become self-conscious about it, but perhaps I create these little crises as a kind of a secret strategy to push myself.”
“It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.”
As he talks, I notice a single drop of paint on the floor beneath one of his abstract pictures, the only thing out of place in the studio.
The New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2002
(Taken from Atlas)
Holzer began with Government declassified documents as the text for her “paintings”, or projections.
