Hendrik Werkman

"the art-critic has provided the products of my lab with a (new) label: abracadabra.. ..[but] one can not speak about abracadabra-ism, and that is its advantage on all –isms: it doesnt know time and limits and especially not the periods of time [but] only seasons.. ..all -isms are dead, blown away, sprayed in the air, gone (here imagery does not fit, imagery is always wrong) - only for the abracadabra is the future wall, the coming wall in the next house - how much the peinture of other fabrics is curving and folding itself, polished or blown-up, its all for nothing.. .We are not addressing those offspring but only the artists in this world.."

"I have composed here so many prints from the immediate surroundings around me - starting with the chimneys and the pigeons and the passing ships, the staircase, the labyrinth of corridors and doors, the crazy combinations of beams and wooden walls.."

"As paint I use lightfast printing ink, usually pure, but also mixed. Mixing is not difficult at all, it but can happen in very different ways. Secret means are not applied, but I can not work on them, except in solitude (at sunshine). No one works in this way. I believe that no one else can obtain the same color effects, except after a lot of practice and experience. Sometimes one print goes up to 50 times under the printing-press. [I make] Never more than one piece per day."

"This afternoon I just finished a print which I started Monday. We got a revolving door here in the post office [in the city Groningen] and thats such a nice thing to use."

"..not the familiar paradise, but the unknown - somewhere in a continent that hasn’t been discovered yet by anyone from the civilized countries - I have escaped [in his prints!] because it is almost unbearable to be in our world."

"GRONINGEN, BERLIN, MOSCOW, PARIS 1923 Start of the violet season Reader As we are convinced that it is not too LATE, we will speak. Time is running, honestly.. ..it has become necessary now to do something, before it is too late There must be witnessing and speaking.. ..Art is everywhere. She is thrown us people on our jackets by the birds. In every infant with weak intestines, the latent seed is laid for an artist.. Our first publication will soon be published. We urgently invite you to become a fellow reader [of the upcoming art-magazine The Next Call].. .. We count on your DEEDS in the white season with the black shadows.."