Quotes from James Elkins

Seeing is metamorphosis, not mechanism.

A picture will leave me unmoved if I don't take time with it, but if I stop, and let myself get a little lost, there's no telling what might happen

I am going to be careful not to make too much sense

As the decades go by, a painter's life becomes a life lived with oil paint, a story told in the thicknesses of oil. Any history of painting that does not take that obsession seriously is incomplete.

Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.