"In the summer of 1912 I once more had oil paints and lunch. I unloaded my obsessions onto canvas day and night – Judgement days, world’s ends, and gibbets of skulls, for in those days the great universal storm was already baring its teeth and costing its glaring yellow shadow across my whimpering brush-hand.”

From “Mein Leben” 1919

“I trembled, all the high summer through in front of canvases that seethed with all the fuming anguish of earth, in every pitch of colour, in every scrap of cloud, and in every cascading stream…. My brain bled dreadful visions. I could see nothing but a thousand skeletons jigging in a row. Many graves and burned cities writhed across the plains… July had beaten my brains to a froth with its implacable brightness and the white, noiseless heatstroke. But August has a stale sour smell of diarrhoea and dead bodies… And so I too welcomed the September breeze and was well again. The heat fell away from me and ebbed away gently in the starless nights, and the rain cooled my afflicted, death marked brow”

From “Vision des apokalyptischen Sommers” 1920

“That was a summer unlike any other, in a brooding, lowering metropolis of Berlin, high up on the sixth floor of a modest apartment house in Friedenau. That angry vicious, summer began in the spring of 1912; it was a strange and doom-laden time for me as none other ever was. I was very poor but not at all unhappy. I was charged with energy, full of mighty plans; I had faith in a magnificent future. I had made a home for myself under the blistering hot slate roof; in a cheap studio with an iron bedstead, a chair, a mirror, and a number of bones that served as tables and closets, and on one of which there wobbled a spirit burner with a pot of lentils, white beans, or potatoes simmered. Food was a minor matter, and I did not crave it, but sail cloth, bought cheap in the Wertheim department store, seemed the most valuable thing there was. I was in love with that canvas, which I stretched and grounded myself, and went so far as to kiss it with trembling lips before painting those ominous landscapes. By the end of May the heat was getting hard to bear. But I was going to hold out. I was damned stubborn. What I lacked in skill I made up in boldness and insolence; I did not paint from life, but what my imagination told me to paint. Dripping with sweat, even when I throw off clothes, it was so hard - oh, how hard it seemed to me to get down on canvas what I wanted to say. Still, I sweated, stamped and slaved long afternoons away until evening fell, that kindly Friedenau evening that was not kindly at all up in my little cell, but a time to sweat and to groan and to refuse to shake off the burden of toil, even for a few hours. Bathed in sweat, I felt like a heavy-jowled hound careering along in a wild chase, mile after mile to find his master – represented in my case by a finished oil painting replete with apocalyptic doom. I feared those visions, although the finished products gave me a strange, warm feeling of satisfaction, a slightly satanic joy.

So it went on, day after day, every one fo them sunny and scorching but all through June until the July moon eventually waned, still boiling hot, all through the hottest weeks of all, sweating, unspeakably oppressive devastating, arduous. But I never wavered; I consecrated myself to the service of the unfathomable and the arduous and did not weaken.”

“On the Summer of the Apocalyptic Landscapes”, 1964

“Sometimes when I feel a nocturnal need I venture forth into the city….and hustle headlong along the pavements…

The screams of clouds echo around me, burning bushes, a distant beating of wings, and people shadowy and spitting. The moon burns across my hot temples… the city rears. My body crackles. The giggles of the city ignite against my skin. I hear eruptions at the base of my skull. The houses rear. Their catastrophes explode from their windows, stairways silently collapse. People laugh beneath the ruins.”

From ”Im Nacken das Sternemeer”, 1918