Hundertwasser's comment on the work

I painted this in bed. I had jaundice in Rome, and I was never more industrious and feverishly active than in this hospital bed. By the time my illness was over, I had ten fantastic drawings finished. It was so terrifically convenient that they brought the meals to my bed, and beverages, and that the paints were lying ready beside me. This is one of those pictures. I had a special ground then, not a vinyl-acetate ground, but one of lime, a lime-chalk ground. As I always have some material with me just in case, I even had a number of sheets of this prepared paper with me while I was a hospital patient. With the flower at the upper right - the colours are a little different than those of the other flowers - no ground had been applied. The paper is a yellow Italian market paper, the kind that was actually used as wrapping for fruit. I am very anxious that the picture will completely disintegrate someday, but it's still holding up, although it has changed hands often thus far. It is always terribly painful for me when I don't know where my pictures are. I really suffer great torment. Of the pictures I have painted there are about 50 that I don't know where they are. Often I have anguished dreams because I don't where this or that picture is. I think I would do the most foolhardy things and make any sacrifice to know where this or that picture is. I have already written thousands of letters to find out where certain pictures are. I can't imagine that other painters don't have this nagging feeling, too - I can only imagine it if other painters have no deep relationship with their pictures and just paint and don't care if they never see them again. - Really, I can't. - Maybe it's a mania with me: when I paint now I already think of all the hardship a picture will go through someday. That's why I have such a hard time parting with a picture. Not because I like it so much myself. I am willing to part with pictures, but I would like to know where they are. I don't want to keep pictures myself, I just want to be informed as to where they are and how they are. (from: Hundertwasser, Buchheim Verlag, Feldafing, 1964 and ed. 1973, p. 20)Again and again I have tried to paint the Venetian glass vase of my childhood from memory. (from: Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 270)