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…

- James Elkins

All seeing, I think, is painful. Every photograph is a little sting, a hurt inflicted in its subject, but even more: every glance hurts in some way, …

- James Elkins

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…

- James Elkins

Perhaps art criticism cannot be reformed in a logical sense because it was never well-formed in the first place. Art criticism has long been a mongre…

- James Elkins

In the context of a question regarding what an artist might be, I would want to raise the question of what a theorist might be, to signal how inextri…

- James Elkins

Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a …

- James Elkins

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…

- James Elkins

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

- James Elkins

To put it as simply as possible - and this is a simple answer, not a total answer - I know when a painting's finished when I understand why I wanted …

- James Elkins