Hundertwasser's comment on the work

I like the house very much and the spiral very much. This is the first time I combined both so closely. I was astonished myself how well spiral and house suit each other. I called the picture "The Neighbours". Since the spiral is a symbol of the sun to me and the house a symbol of the moon, I put gold in the middle of the spiral and painted a silver window in the middle of the house. Here I painted a spiral in complementary colours for the first time. That is: beginning in the middle I painted a contrast of red and green. As the red spiral devolves outward, it slowly turns violet and blue and green, and for this line I always chose the proper complementary colour. I often sign the pictures at their various corners, to indicate clearly that they can be hung in different ways. This always makes for complications and arguments when hanging the pictures for exhibitions when I'm not on hand, because nobody knows how the picture is supposed to be hung, because it is signed on various sides. I don't paint pictures the way others do, on an easel; I paint them lying horizontally on a table and often by rotating them around their own midpoint. In Japan, for instance, where it is so complicated to stand up and sit down, I had a system for painting large pictures: I put a book on the table on which the picture could be spun like a disk. As far as the arm could reach toward the middle of the picture I could have a command of the picture and paint. I could not really see the picture until it was finished - when I had a chance to stand up and set it up vertically. That is why my pictures viewed from above often go from top to bottom or bottom to top - like the constellations (from: Hundertwasser, Buchheim Verlag, Feldafing, 1964 and ed. 1973, p. 24)