Painting Topics

If men at forty will be painting lakes
The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one,
The basic slate, the universal hue.
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

Here are a couple of generalisations about England that would be accepted by almost all observers. One is that the English are not gifted artistically. They are not as musical as the Germans or Italians, painting and sculpture have never flourished in England as they have in France. Another is that, as Europeans go, the English are not intellectual. They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic “world view.” Nor is this because they are “practical,” as they are so fond of claiming for themselves. One has only to look at their methods of town-planning and water-supply, their obstinate clinging to everything that is out-of-date and a nuisance, a spelling system that defies analysis and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency.
—George Orwell (1903–1950)

The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury; for the sculptor it is a necessity.
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)