Laura Cumming > Quotes

“I cannot get enough of Dutch art. You can turn to this other world -- and it is a picture world as no other, a whole society visualised through time and place, seasons and generations, moment by moment -- and live inside it in your thoughts. There is always more of it, and then inexhaustibly more. Every time I think I have seen my last Dutch painting another comes into view, in some old museum or faraway city. I once saw, in a hotel in Algiers, a Dutch still life of redcurrants glinting on a silver dish and was momentarily transported to a long-ago Delft day. Paintings can take you anywhere, but they are also a land in themselves, a society, a place to be.”
― Laura Cumming, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death

“To commemorate Veda’s life, Elizabeth planted thousands of daffodil bulbs in the grounds of Chapel school for the pupils to pick on Mother’s Day each year, so that no future mother would ever be forgotten.”
― Laura Cumming, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

“Fabritius is thirty-two, and I was the same age when I first wrote about his self-portrait. He and I remain the same age whenever we meet. He is dead, I am still alive, so the existential maths [sic] is now absurd. But a person in a portrait does not age, even if the painting does. The picture removes the person from time's harm and fixes them in the moment; and so it does for me. I never go to a gallery and think that these people are dead and gone, no matter how long ago they were depicted. The painting fuses the person in the moment and that moment somehow includes me, and you, and everyone to come. Here he is now, Carel Fabritius, and so he will remain; the artist appearing in and as his own painting.”
― Laura Cumming, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death

“We see pictures in time and place. We cannot see them otherwise. They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence that may be as unremarkable as rain or as startling as a clap of thunder. Whatever we are that day, whatever is going on behind our eyes, or in the forests of our lives, is present in what we see. We see with everything that we are.”
― Laura Cumming, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death

“Nobody ever spoke of love, a word Betty never heard in childhood. Even now she has only modest hopes of other people’s affections. She is the woman who always asks all the questions of egotists who never offer any in return, who writes back every letter by return of post, who cannot let gratitude be delayed by a moment, who never wants anyone to be left out, sincere in all her love and concern.”
― Laura Cumming, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

“Pictures hold thoughts, ideas and memories like the pockets of a coat.”
― Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

“The lives of even quite recent generations might almost disappear from our understanding if we did not think of their aspirations.”
― Laura Cumming, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

“and death. Memories”
― Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons

“of low-lying ground, with stagnant rivers and melancholy trees for islands in them, and a surface punctured all”
― Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons

“Hilda kept the photograph by her forever. “A picture of a little girl who once belonged to me,” as she described it to Susan. It reminds me of my mother’s phrase: “You are my most precious possession.” I did not understand it, still react against its connotations of ownership, until I remember its corollary: “I never belonged to anyone until I belonged to you.”
― Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

“Photography gives us memories we hardly knew we had: the house where we were born, our infant selves, the embarrassing clothes we once wore. But the camera is also capable of giving us memories we cannot actually have because we were not there in the first place.”
― Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

“not know how to be still, and I hardly do now, except perhaps in front of art. So my gratitude to artists is unending. And to me these paintings by Coorte are life stilled, dense with the time taken to paint them, and the appreciation of what is painted. They are not peaceful so much as pointed, not sedative, but poised in wonderment and awe. They slow my eyes and my thought, and they help with that hardest of all questions”
― Laura Cumming, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death

“Perhaps it was not George but Betty Veda loved enough to forgive him.”
― Laura Cumming, On Chapel Sands: The Mystery of My Mother's Disappearance as a Child

“It is such a long journey out, this one, from where we came; this life, our life, the journey between the first and last shores.”
― Laura Cumming, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death