Like the early cubists, I couldn’t use much color at this point as the problems were complicated enough without this additional one. (Concerning the begin of white writing)

Every artist’s problem today is „What will we do with the Human?“

I wanted to smash this image that was in space and I wanted to give the light that was in the form in space a release. [...]
I really wanted to smash form, to melt it in a more moving and dynamic way. [...]
<forms> should be freer and not so separated from the space around them. (Concerning the years 1919-1921)

That’s the only time I was ever lost in fog. Whatever I did that entire day I haven’t any idea but I know what it is to have no consciousness at all and be in a fog. [...]
Then the Armistice came and World Peace at last. It happened about eleven o’clock one morning; at two A.M. the next morning I found myself dancing in the streets; it was the one time I was completely integrated with the mass spirit. (Concerning the end of World War II)

Of course I can give many reasons, that they <sumi ink paintings> were a natural growth from my experience with the brush and sumi ink in Japan and China, but why did I wait some twenty years before doing them? There are so many suggestions on this question I could fill a book. Perhaps painting that way I freed myself or thought I did. Perhaps I wanted to paint without too much thought. I don’t think I was in the void, that rather popular place today. But then maybe I wanted to be - it’s difficult to be faster than thought. Which screen of ourselves comes first - the inner when one wants to state an inner condition, knowing it has to take flesh to be understood and knowing also that, because of the outer covering, it will be side-tracked and sit there for ones understood as a symbol without reality? Already I have gone too far, but I feel I have kept the problem in view.
How can I state in an understanding way why I did the Sumi paintings? Then, too, why after white writing should I turn to black ink? Well, the other side of the coin can be just as interesting, but to make myself simple I should remain a coin with only one side showing the imprint of man. It wouldn’t be necessary to turn me over then - no need to order or compare. Ibsen expressed it very well when he said, „Where I was ten years ago, you are now there but I am not with you.“