('My three year old daughter can do as much'.) Yes, it is true, but the difference is that I do it. - Karel Appel

One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time in a attic in the red light section of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials. I was looking in the street like when I was a young boy, in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires, and paint. I left my parents in 1940. Years later I saw an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam curated by Willem Sandberg and there I saw the real 'objet trouvé'; until then I had never heard about it. Schwitters was a shattering experience.

At the very moment when my ego is unprooted [uprooted?] and freed of intellectual activities and values, the realization of what is still unknown and uncreated, the silent 'non-form' unity emerges, appearing as childish schizophrenia. The indefinable beginning takes form

When I was young I once found a book in a Dutch translation, The 'Leaves of Grass'. It was the first time a book touched me by its feeling of freedom and open spaces, the way the poet spoke of the ocean by describing a drop of water in his hand. Walt Whitman was offering the world an open hand (now we call it democracy) and my 'Monument for Walt Whitman' became this open hand with mirrors, so you can see inside yourself.