Hundertwasser's comment on the work

Here I treated an architectural and also mystical problem. I am very fond of the onion. I have been told that in many countries the onion is revered as a deity. It is regarded as a fertility symbol. That is why onion turrets were built. As to the architecture itself, I am for an architecture which is not straight. And I can well imagine a church which is also a hill. Strange: a humpbacked person is thought to be ugly and somebody who isn't as beautiful. A church which has no hump is said to be beautiful, and a church which has one, ugly. - So I drew a humpy church which is particularly in need of affection - I put gold windows on it. The picture was done during a trip. The paper is irregular on the edges. I like irregular paper a lot and often paint the margin with extreme care, and to show that I set great store in the irregular edges I give it a particularly opulent margin, the way brocade is given an ornate hem. Intentionally, that is, for I have experienced horrible things: often irregular watercolours were cut into rectangles - and that's not all - they were also often pasted onto wood and canvas, too - and that's not all - they were also varnished, in order to sell them as oil paintings. In Italy and other Romance countries there is unfortunately a terrible disease: that watercolours don't count as much as oil paintings. If you have a watercolour, you have to change it into an oil painting by all means. I think the Italians did that with Klee, too. That is just horrible. A fruitful vandalism! It's odd that the watercolour is so cherished and highly regarded by the Germans and English, but not there. (from: Hundertwasser, Buchheim Verlag, Feldafing, 1964 and ed. 1973, p. 12)That houses and especially churches must have earth, grass, hills and trees on the roof, of that I was already firmly convinced. For too long the - probably erroneous - interpretation of the Bible "And have dominion over the earth" has held sway. It is time that we do the opposite: give territories back to the earth which we have misappropriated. Everything which is horizontal under the open sky belongs to nature. Later, when I planned a Catholic/Protestant integrative school with places of worship next to the day-care centre in Heddernheim in 1987 and made a model of it, the Bishop of Limburg thwarted construction with the words: "Man, the crown of Creation, must not have earth above him". (from: Hundertwasser 1928-2000, Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 2, Taschen, Cologne, 2002, p. 446)