I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed….

Most people would guess that the sun is fifty or a hundred times brighter than the moon, but it's a half million times brighter - evidence of the ama….

Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to..

Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the license t….

What kinds of problems, and what kinds of meanings, happen in the paint? Or as one historian puts it, 'What is thinking in painting, as opposed to th….

The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every painting captures a c….

Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids..….

To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriat….

It is as if only irrelevance can be promoted as art..

If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotiona….

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism..

Seeing alters the thing that is seen and transforms the seer.

Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand..

A painter knows what to do by the tug of the brush as it pulls through a mixture of oils, and by the look of coloured slurries on the palette..

Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a finely tuned antenna, reactin….

A few moments before the sun sets, the dark Earth shadow begins to rise in the east... It is nothing less than the shadow of the entire Earth, cast u….

It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always….

The opposite of a glance... is a glimpse: because in a glance, we see only for a second, and in a glimpse, the object shows itself only for a second..

The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries..

As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does….

The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films, and naturally it is beyond the range ….