James Elkins Quotes

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

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

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.

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

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

Every meaning is a projection of the viewer's inarticulate moods.

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.

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.