“The theatre gives us representations of things, and there we see a sort of moving, speaking pictures but they are transient whereas painting remains and is always at hand.”

— Jonathan Richardson

Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725)

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Jonathan Richardson 5

English painter 1667–1745

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Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

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“An example: if I compose a picture using as objects a scrap of bark, a scrap of butterfly wing and a purely imaginary form, you probably won't recognise the bark, or the butterfly wing, and you'll say: 'What does this stand for? It is an abstract picture. No it's a representational picture'... There is no such thing as 'abstract', or 'concrete' either. There is a good picture and a bad picture. There is the picture that moves you and the picture that leaves you cold... A picture has a value in itself, like a musical score, like a poem.”

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“We renounce all your spectacles, as strongly as we renounce the matters originating them, which we know were conceived of superstition, when we give up the very things which are the basis of their representations. Among us nothing is ever said, or seen, or heard, which has anything in common with the madness of the circus, the immodesty of the theatre, the atrocities of the arena, the useless exercises of the wrestling-ground.”

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“My first photo Picture? I was doing large pictures in gloss enamel... One day a photograph of Brigit Bardot fell into my hands, and I painted it into one of these pictures in shades of grey. I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic.... thing that everyone could do.”

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Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 43, note 36 : quote on his start with photography

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Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) American artist

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“With her own hand she'd painted herself into a corner, and then out of the picture altogether.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book The Lowland

Source: The Lowland

“Few things make me more livid than insulting bad theatre of any sort. Conversely, perfectly realised and exquisitely elegant performance can move me deeply and reduce me to sobbing like a big girl.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Absolute Magic - A Model for Powerful Close-Up Performance (2003) second edition

“The theatre gives us representations of things, and there we see a sort of moving, speaking pictures but they are transient whereas painting remains and is always at hand.”

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Jonathan Richardson 5

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