Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.
To be naked is to be oneself.
The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.
It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.
It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.
A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.
Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.
Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.
If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.
Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.
Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.
You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.
Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.