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Quote by 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 not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.”

Quote by James Elkins

Book:What Painting Is

Work

What Painting Is

This book delves into the fundamental aspects of painting, examining its techniques, history, and aesthetic principles. more

Author

James Elkins is a renowned art critic born in 1955. His work spans a wide range of fields from modern art to contemporary art, known for his profound analysis and unique insights. more

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“To a nonpainter, oil paint is uninteresting and faintly unpleasant. To a painter, it is the life's blood: a substance so utterly entrancing, infuriating, and ravishingly beautiful that it makes it worthwhile to go back into the studio every morning, year after year, for an entire lifetime.”

Years Beautiful Morning Blood Lifetime Paint Studios Oil Painter Substance Worthwhile Every Morning Infuriating

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

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

Discovery Transformation Paint Oil Brilliant Mood Painter Unexpected Muddy

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“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.”

Shows Objects Opposites Glances Glimpse

Author: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, reacting to very unnoticed movement of the painter's hand, fixing the faintest shadow of a thought in color and texture.”

Giving Art Hands Faces Tree Movement Color Painting Fine Shadow Paint Lovely Painter Texture Fine Arts Fixing Reacting Unnoticed Lovely Things Antenna

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods.”

Artist Speak Color Painting Mass Paint Mood Dialogue Unspoken

Author: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 cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter's body and thoughts.”

Made Body Records Fronts Movement Painting Paint Casts Painter Sat Delicate Gestures Canvas Portraits Tense

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body.”

Play Body Numbers Paint Leaving Rational Abstract Compelling Counting Fertile Hallucinations

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“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 thinking about painting?' These are important questions, and they are very hard to answer using the language of art history.”

Thinking Kind Art Important Hard Problem Happens Language Answers Painting Paint Historian Art History Important Questions

Book:What Painting Is

Source: What Painting Is

“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 inextricably linked these existences and practices might be.”

Want Might Artist Existence Practice Raises Signals Linked Theorists

Author: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, freezing and condensing what's seen into something that it is not.”

Thinking Way Littles Hurt Seeing Subjects Photograph Painful Glances Freezing

Author:James Elkins