SAD: You feel the present, the tension of the time, agitation, anxiety, chaos, and link them to what was in the past, thinking of some future time?
PM: Even if I did not link them, the times would link with each other by themselves. But the strongest is this furious, ardent time. You can see this here, in my latest painting. Colours flow like a river. I felt from the inside that I had to pour out my internal energy quickly. I cannot arrange colours slowly, or build gradually.
SAD: When you talk about this painting, I have an impression that energy emerged with such a strength that it wanted to throw the figure out of the canvas. In a single stroke it has been pushed away to the painting’s margins and has an obvious tendency to run away from the framework.
PM It is the potential of the internal being appearing through the gesture. When I pour it out, It is all over— something comes out of me and I am free. So it absolutely must come out. If am not satisfied with the outcome, I oppose it further, until I fell I have entirely drained my energy out and that satisfaction comes out of me. Then another battle starts on another canvas, but it is not the same one. Feelings cannot be repeated.
SAD: But I insist again on the times. How do you resolve the contact with the past as a memory, with the present as a moment of painting and with the thought of the future? Is there any fourth time?
PM: When you talk it is different. When you paint it all happens unconsciously, it all comes out together, it is mixed and lives a life of its own. The painting is a sum total of the times, since I was born, up to the present moment, thinking at the same time of tomorrow. The painting comprises all times.
SAD: Both subconscious and unconscious mechanisms are at work at the same time, aren’t they?
PM: Today’s children grow in closed spaces, like in incubators. I slept on an open porch, on a threshing ground. I looked at the stars, I woke from time to time, I drew from nature and again sank into sleep. This fed me, it made me think and communicate with the cosmos. All my senses were awake – to smell the dark, to hoar the light, to see the straw— I accumulated steadily and directly from nature. These were situations where everything played within me, everything was awake. Silence annoyed me. I liked it only as a contrast – when somebody would interrupt it with a bang of the door. The shock arouses my whole being.
SAD: So you became aware of these things early. Many children in similar circumstances remain indifferent to such sensations, don’t they?
PM: Art did it for me, it made me awake. Art is the broadest, endless absorption from life, from the individual.
SAD: Do you think of the future now while you paint? Do you imagine any combinations that may come true in the future, but still haven’t?
PM: There is a heap, a pile of feelings and notions that cannot be separated. I only try to let them come out of me one by one, to place and arrange them gradually. And when the most important feeling – the final stage – is about to come out, I gather all feelings, times and situations, and pour them out together on the canvas. The end is most important. It is also important for the warm-up stage. When I begin painting I warm up, I warm up, the temperature rises to a maximum, and then either the thermometer breaks or something creative comes out. And what will become of it tomorrow is not too important to me.