All beauty is painful.  When you try to squeeze the beauty of nature into a rectangle, you encounter certain problems. How you deal with those problems is painting.

Richard Serra, The Band

Beauty is also personal.  Since Einstein, there is no such thing as a single reality – each person is in a different place, seeing from a different perspective. So billions of people see billions of different realities.

I didn’t really understand that until I saw Richard Serra’s monumental steel sculptures – my first reaction was ‘Oh, that’s Einstein’s equation!’ He didn’t know he was doing that, but he was.

I was prejudiced against him, I admit, because I thought he was just being trendy, putting logs in a museum and so on.  But when I saw that sculpture, I was impressed.  Every time you move around, you are seeing something else.

White Piano, Galya Tarmu

It has to do with time and space and relations – nothing can be changed without the whole thing falling apart.  That is what I am trying to do.  You are always in danger of ruining years of work.  Really a lifetime of work.

I don’t think Serra was thinking about Einstein when he made his sculptures.  And I don’t think about the theory of relativity when I’m painting, but maybe all art is an expression of it.