Status Updates From Keeping an Eye Open: Essays...

'H.H. [Hodgkin] has always been a difficult interviewee, not least because he doesn't want to talk about his own pictures, let alone "explain" them. In later years, his refusal to play the game has become extreme. Interviewers have received monosyllabic answers and long pauses; there was a famous onstage disaster with Simon Schama at a literary festival.'

'Then there are the exterior nudes [of Vallotton]: female bathers up to the knee and thigh in the sea; a chunky Europa hitching a ride in the shallows from a very farmyard bull; a modern Andromeda with a blonde bob tied by the wrists to a rock and responding to her predicament as if it is all terribly, terribly inconvenient...'

'The first time I visited the Phillips Collection in Washington I saw a painting which instantly entered my top ten and has remained there ever since. (In fact, I saw several others that did the same—a Courbet, a Degas and a Bonnard—but then I've never counted up my top ten, which runs to well over a hundred by now.)'

'Courbet—who was born in Ornans in 1819, came to Paris at the age of twenty and had his first picture accepted by the Salon five years later—created, or adapted to his use, the persona of the boisterous, belligerent, subversive, shit-kicking provincial; then, like some contemporary TV personality, he found that this public image had become indistinguishable from his true nature.'

Delaceoiv - How Romamtic

Geticault - A Catastophe of Art -completed

Flaubert believed it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another & great paintings required no words of explanation.Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting.But we are very far from reaching that state.We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions.It is a rare picture which stuns,or argues, us into silence.