If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly make emotional contact with the artists? Few centuries, it seems, are as determinedly tearless as ours.
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
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
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, …
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
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…
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
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…
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
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…
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
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 …
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
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…
Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism. - James Elkins
Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.
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
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 …
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