I thought I should make something – I felt it would be so easy – it would take form under my hands like magic. - Edvard Munch

By painting colours and lines and forms seen in a quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does.

I am at work on a girl. It is quite simple a girl getting up on the edge of her bed and pulling on her stockings. The bed is whitish, and in addition there are white sheets, a white nightdress, a bedside table with a white cover, white curtains and a blue wall. [as model for his painting 'Morning', 1884]

No one in art has yet penetrated as far [as Dostoyevsky into the mystical realms of the soul, towards the metaphysical, the subconsciousness, viewing the external reality of the world as merely a sign, a symbol of the spiritual and metaphysical.