Hundertwasser's comment on the work

This painting means quite a lot to me - I am always glad when I can invent something new. It was in Sottomarina, and I was crossing a bridge, and suddenly I saw people wearing sunglasses coming towards me on bicycles, and I suddenly discovered the glasses, as if I had never seen spectacles before. For me that was the very discovery of eyeglasses. From that day on I have looked on glasses only as spirals and as something uncannily magical, as magic instruments, as it were, that one can look through, through which one sees the world differently - indeed, I think one could write books about eyeglasses. Of course glasses are also a mask which covers the eyes. For me glasses are almost worth more than the eyes themselves, that is, glasses are a counterpart to the eyes, equivalent to the eyes. And add to this the "nose-river". I always depicted noses as rivers. And something is in fact always flowing down in the nose, and since a river is blue, I always paint noses blue. Beneath it the mouth is a boat: the mouth-boat. To me mouths are like boats - by virtue of their shape. So there are three symbols in the picture: the spiral glasses, the nose-river and the mouth-boat. And then there is the symbol of the garden fence . . . What that means I don't know myself. It is also interesting that the face has been squeezed into a square. Basically I don't want to depict any human figure and human faces anymore, and this is one anyway. (from: Hundertwasser, Buchheim Verlag, Feldafing, 1964 and ed. 1973, p. 32)