“In my living room there are two large bookcases, each one eight feet tall, and they have about five hundred books between them. If I step up to a shelf and look at the books one by one, I can… — James Elkins Copy Share Image
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… — James Elkins Copy Share
Modern paintings often seem to have been made quickly, by comparison with the paintings of earlier centuries, and that seems to give us the… — James Elkins Copy Share
Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the… — James Elkins Copy Share
A few moments before the sun sets, the dark Earth shadow begins to rise in the east... It is nothing less than the shadow… — James Elkins Copy Share
At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colours of the rainbow. If the violin came… — James Elkins Copy Share
The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films, and naturally… — James Elkins Copy Share
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… — James Elkins Copy Share
Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a… — James Elkins Copy Share
Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand. — James Elkins Copy Share
I'd like to understand why it seems normal to look at astonishing achievements made by unapproachably ambitious, luminously pious, strangely obsessed artists, and toss… — James Elkins Copy Share
If paintings are so important - worth so much, reproduced, cherished, and visited so often - then isn't it troubling that we can hardly… — James Elkins Copy Share
The purple light or glow, which appears roughly fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset... looks like an isolated bright spot fairly high in the… — James Elkins Copy Share
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,… — James Elkins Copy Share
