It is pretty obvious that “heads” play an important role in my work. Even when I was a kid I used to draw heads in my notebooks at school all the time, often only contour lines with names given, a bit like a comic strip. I think my enthusiasm for heads simply stems from the intense pleasure I gain from thinking things through, e.g. when I was nine years old and was constructing theories about the possible fault lines of brick which I was hitting one with a chunk of granite while sitting in the warm summer sun in front of our henhouse. I remember this vividly, because it took me two hours until finally my mother called me for dinner. On the other hand I never had the slightest urge to depict a person’s head or face, not anything closely resembling a real human being, I never did really try. Maybe parts like an eyelid or a pupil to train drawing technique. But anything more, anything coming close to the real thing took away the allure. What I “saw” I wanted to take photos of, but, because of my miserable equipment, the results were poor at that time. This “Captain” instead would have been right for my taste even then: This captain’s head is not “surreal”, but a creature in my own fantasy world, in the “realm of (creative) freedom”.