Hundertwasser's comment on the work

This is a subject which I used three or four times. It is the third painting of the Eye Balance series. When I painted it I wasn't actually thinking of an eye, but of the matte and shiny portions. I had done the painting with watercolours and coated it with a varnish that would let the watercolours really shine through. Then I painted the dark portions onto the varnish and smeared them afterwards in the middle. The middle surfaces of the watercolour portions have less varnish, so that the matte and shiny parts are connected - depending on whether they had been painted with water or oil technique. I also included gold in this painting. At the time I had begun to use gold more and more frequently, irregardless of the fact that painting with gold was thought to be childish. Probably thanks to my "ancestors" Schiele and Klimt, who also used gold a lot, I had no qualms at all about using this material and pasting genuine gold foil onto the surface. At the time I didn't yet know how to apply it properly. That lent the pictures a particular attractiveness. Now, unfortunately, I know exactly how to apply the gold, and now the results are no longer such beautifully ragged surfaces. The title The Eye Balance came later, as so often. When a painting like this one is finished, I try like everything to think up a title. Title is not right; name is better - just like you say to people Franz, Joseph, or Annemarie, I called the painting Eye Balance. It is an eye suspended anatomically by its tendons, but it can also mean something different, something entirely different. I worked a bit faster on this painting. (from: Hundertwasser, Buchheim Verlag, Feldafing, 1964 and ed. 1973, p. 40).