“No real painter ever wants be known through any other medium than his painting.”
The Artist Speaks (1951)
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Patrick Swift 60
British artist 1927–1983Related quotes

13 January 1857 (p. 339)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

"The Flower Lady" http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/lyrics/flower-lady.html
Pleasures of the Harbor (1967)

1911 - 1940, Notes on Painting - Edward Hopper (1933)

“A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute”
X magazine (1959-62)
Context: The Art of painting is itself an intensely personal activity. It may be labouring the obvious to say so but it is too little recognised in art journalism now that a picture is a unique and private event in the life of the painter: an object made alone with a man and a blank canvas... A real painting is something which happens to the painter once in a given minute; it is unique in that it will never happen again and in this sense is an impossible object. It is judged by the painter simply as a success or failure without qualification. And it is something which happens in life not in art: a picture which was merely the product of art would not be very interesting and could tell us nothing we were not already aware of. The old saying, “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”, expresses the opposite idea to that which animates the painter before his canvas. It is precisely what he does not know which may destroy him.

“A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.”
Addressing an audience at Carnegie Hall, as quoted in The New York Times (11 May 1967); often this is quoted without the humorous final sentence.
Context: A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 205: in a letter to Ambroise Vollard, January 1900

Claude Monet, in an interview, 1895; as quoted in: Paul Hayes Tucker et al. (eds). (1999) Monet in the Twentieth Century. London: Royal Academy of Arts/Boston: Museum of Fine Arts. As cited in: Steven Connor, " About There, or Thereabouts http://www.stevenconnor.com/aboutthere/aboutthere.pdf." talk given at the Catalysis conference on Space and Time, Downing College, Cambridge, 23rd March 2013.
1890 - 1900

“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”
What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936), Afterword of a later edition