Artist, Marlene Dumas: Don't Talk to Strangers is a very good example of the first period of my stay in Holland, because at that stage I thought I was not going to paint again. I discovered these big rolls of paper and so suddenly I thought I didn't need painting any more. The drawing, the collage, could carry everything I wanted to say.
At the same time I was also reading all these letters from South Africa. And at a certain stage I tore up all these letters and put the ends on the beginnings.
Don't Talk to Strangers is the beginning and end of love letters, without the names of the people; there's also letters from my mother.
A friend of mine, ex-boyfriend actually, once said to me while we're sitting in a restaurant and I was speaking to the waiter and wanting to tell him about what's going on, and he says, “Well, you always want to talk to strangers and tell them everything.” And then I thought, well, in a sense being an artist is talking to strangers because the work starts often in more private space and then ends up in a public space.
So actually this old work is one of my favorites, because although there's no literally figurative painting in it, it is about the same type of problems of what is the origin of a thing, and what are you actually doing when you are making a work of art.