What was the point?

Was it the tape around my fingers against the pain? Was it the excruciatingly boring work that went on for weeks and weeks? Knowing that what I was working on for the last hour or two where mostly specks that were the result of the distortions introduced into the original during the enlargement process. Cutting out all the white, and only the white like a crazy robot, trying to add to or omit from the template as little as possible, act as brainless as possible, was definitely part of "the point". Creating something but not being present while doing it.

I remember the fascination when I discovered by pure chance what happened when light fell through the template. The template gave away nothing, only spots and dots, I had my face only centimetres over it while cutting away the white with a stencil knife, so I did not see the whole thing, but when light fell through it, I saw a perfect eye, cheekbone, hand, lock of hair... I could not get enough from holding up the cardboard and focus the light on different parts of it, watching the images on the walls of my room at night. Sometimes I thought, this is even better than the spraypaint. But it is only light, I can not make it stay.

The regret: I never put one of my works on a wall at night. I should have.

And of course: Being totally dumbstruck with awe after spraying the first picture from a finished template. Nothing compares to it. Trying to make the template adhere as tightly as possible to the canvas to get these razor-sharp borders between colour and no-colour. Finding out the beauty of shadows, of colour bleeding like light into the dark areas, came later.