Thus it is with all pictures, there are many layers, and with good reason an analysis nearly always deals with the last [layer]. The last layer in a … - Per Kirkeby

I believe that painting, in our meaning, is structures. Each application of paint to a surface is structure. This is, of course, self-evident, but a superstructure of meaning can occur. One can have various motives for doing it. And here that difficult motif comes in. I believe that a ruthless accumulation of structure reworkings leads to one meeting one's motif. One's life-motif, so to speak. That which one has and does not know that one has it. A sort of geology, as when, in a constant process, sedimentation and erosion makes the earth we live on like it is now, without any meaning in itself in a rational sense, but accepted as that upon which we live in this life..

Landscapes are about beauty and death. The only way you can define beauty.. ..is to know that death is hiding behind it. This is what haunts you when you’re doing a so-called landscape painting. -

Painting is laying layer upon layer. Without exception it is fundamental to all painted pictures even if they look as if they were done in one movement. The movement has always crossed its own track somewhere. It is easy to understand that a picture is layer upon layer when it comes to Picabia's puzzle pictures or my own material works, but it is difficult with the 'synchronos'. By the 'synchronous' I mean all those pictures where all the layers aim at the same picture, where the under-painting and following layers – glazed or not – fall on top of each other. The 'unsynchronous' are the ones where each new layer is a new picture. It is like geological strata with cracks and discordances. But each new layer, however furious, is always infected and coloured by the underlying one. Even when it is slates where the previous payer is completely removed physically, wiped off.