Hold a Candle To

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (906-2), 2008
Oil on wood, 15 3/4 x 15 3/4 in. (source)

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"What's the point of being alive," she said, "if you're not going to communicate?" (p. 39)

"But the academies proved that everyone with a modicum of talent can make an impeccably proportioned figure, if they are trained to do so. The tens of thousands of drawings by Baroque academy students held in museums throughout Europe and America, show that basically anyone can learn to draw a figure with reasonably correct proportions. A proportionally correct drawing is not really a matter of skill, and only marginally a question of training. Everything difficult about drawing begins after proportions are not longer an issue." (p. 20)

"That's the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards," said Mrs. Berman. "You don't write for the whole world, and you don't write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person." (p. 65)

"Later in the century Whistler said, 'I don't teach art; with that I cannot interfere; but I teach the scientific application of paint and brushes.'" (p. 30)

". . . because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions." (p. 82)

"Out of a thousand art students, maybe five will make a living off their art, and perhaps one will be known outside her city. That's not a condemnation. It's the nature of fame, real quality, and genuine influence to be rare." (p. 67)

"How can you tell a good painting from a bad one?" he said. This is the son of a Hungarian horse trainer. He has a magnificent handlebar mustache. "All you have to do my dear," he said, "is look at a million paintings, and then you can never be mistaken." (p. 165)

"Too much drive and engagement narrows the possibilities of art just as much as an excess of insouciance. Unfortunately studio art instruction nearly always privileges and rewards the deadly serious students over all the others." (p. 81)

"And what is literature, Rabo," he said, "but an insider's newsletter about affairs relating to molecules, of no importance to anything in the Universe but a few molecules who have the disease called 'thought.'" (p. 210)

"It is also said that art itself is ineffable, and people teach 'around' it or 'up to' it. Oscar Wilde says the same thing, a bit less ponderously: 'Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.'" (p. 99)

"The whole magical thing abut our painting, Mrs. Berman, and this was old stuff in music, but it was brand new in painting: it was pure essence of human wonder, and wholly apart from food, from sex, from clothes, from houses, from drugs, from cars, from news, from money, from crime, from punishment, from games, from war, from peace -- and surely apart from the universal human impulse among painters and plumbers alike toward inexplicable despair and self-destruction!" (p. 312)

Elizabeth Neel, Come and Gone, 2009
Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 48 cm (source)