For the painter, for whom painting is a vital activity and a way of life - not merely a profession - such attitudes as we find in the histories are deadly. For him the only benefit, at least the deepest and most important benefit, which he can get from the study of the Masters comes from his capacity to see the painting in a thoroughly contemporary way. I mean in the present tense - the tense after all in which it was painted. Not for instance as an early this or a late that, nor as a good example of chiaroscuro or some other aesthetic or technical quality but as an immediately important human statement completely relevant to his life at the moment and convincing for that reason. If a work does not strike the painter in this way all further analysis of it will be futile.
Patrick SwiftRelated topics
aesthetic benefit comes contemporary early example find good human instance late mean moment nor present quality reason see strike study technical tense vital way work mastersRelated quotes
There was one artist who wrote as beautifully as he painted. That was Hokusai - He speaks for all artists, whether they are painters or not. [He wrote]: "I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy three I have at last caught every aspect of nature-birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further. And I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime, and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life."
Henry Miller
And it's certain that unexpected new ideas are beginning to emerge. That paintings are once again beginning to be painted in very different tone from a few years ago.
The last thing I made is a rather large study of an avenue of poplars with the yellow autumn leaves, where the sun makes glittering patches here and there on the fallen leaves on the ground, which are interspersed with the long shadows cast by the trunks. At the end of the road a peasant cottage, and the blue sky above it between the autumn leaves.
I think that in a year's time - having spent that year once again painting a great deal and constantly - I'll change my manner of painting and my colour a great deal, and that I'm likely to become slightly more sombre rather than lighter.
Vincent van Gogh
I, Patrick, a sinner, a most simple countryman, the least of all the faithful and most contemptible to many, had for father the deacon Calpurnius, son of the late Potitus, a priest, of the settlement of Bannavem Taburniae; he had a small villa nearby where I was taken captive. I was at that time about sixteen years of age. I did not, indeed, know the true God; and I was taken into captivity in Ireland with many thousands of people, according to our deserts, for quite drawn away from God, we did not keep his precepts, nor were we obedient to our priests who used to remind us of our salvation. And the Lord brought down on us the fury of his being and scattered us among many nations, even to the ends of the earth, where I, in my smallness, am now to be found among foreigners.
Saint Patrick
The peculiarity of this strike...has been that a great number of separate trades, which have nothing to do with one another...have shown that they intend to make common cause. You may depend upon it that this is a social fact of the highest importance and of very general importance of the future. I believe that the lesson has been learnt from Ireland, and that it is due to the present Government and to its coercive laws in Ireland, and to the necessity which they have laid upon the people of Ireland in different parts of the country which have no connexion with one another to associate together for an object which they believe to be vital to all. I am much inclined to think that the working men of London have learnt this lesson from Ireland.
William Ewart Gladstone
De Chirico [Italian painter, later admired by the Surrealists as 'early Surrealist'] found himself in 1912 confronted with the problem of following one of the roads already opened or of opening a new road. He avoided Fauvism as well as Cubism and introduced what could be called 'metaphysical painting'. Instead of exploiting the coming medium of abstraction, he organized on his canvases the meeting of elements which could only meet in a 'metaphysical world'. These elements, painted in the minutest technique, were 'exposed' on a horizontal plane in orthodox perspective. This technique, in opposition to the Cubist or the purely abstract formula in full bloom at the moment, protected de Chirico's position and allowed him to lay down the foundation of what was to become Surrealism ten years later.
Marcel Duchamp