What I Don't Know

“Franz Kline was being questioned once — not with hostility but with intensity, by a friend — and finally he said, “Well, look, if I paint what you know, then that will simply bore you — the repetition from me to you. If I paint what I know, it will be boring to me. Therefore, I paint what I don’t know.”

For Kline, painting what he didn’t know required no disavowal of the past, but rather ongoing discovery. He hoped that a viewer experiencing his art would be as actively engaged.

— from Franz Kline by Harry Gaugh