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. — James Elkins Copy Share Image
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… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
Substances are like mirrors that let us see things about ourselves that we cannot quite understand. — James Elkins Copy Share Image
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 Image
![“The range in brightness from the purple glow [of the sunset] to the dark sky above is too great for most films, and naturally it is beyond the range of printed pictures.” quote by James Elkins](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/e1b/james-elkins-19808_brightness_the-range-in-brightness-from-the-purple_651915.jpg)
